



HISTORICAL ADDRESS. 



WALKER. 




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ADDRESS 



TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY 

OF THE /* 

First Church of Christ, 

HARTFORD, 

OotoToer 11, ieS3, 

BY 

GEO. LEON WALKER, Pastor. 



HARTFORD, CONN. : 

Press of The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company. 

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THE HISTORICAL ADDRESS. 

BY GEORGE LEON WALKER, PASTOR. 

A historical discourse has been announced as one of the 
features of this celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth 
anniversary of the First Church of Christ in Hartford. But 
the attempt to tell the story of two and a half centuries at a 
single sitting of an afternoon congregation, is much like 
depicting the course of the Connecticut river on the page of 
a school-boy's atlas. The map-maker indeed undertakes the 
attempt, and succeeds after a manner. But it is by heroically 
ignoring all minor details and confining his notice only to 
the main features of mountain headland and long river-sweep 
and abrupt bend and general direction and losing necessarily 
thereby almost all the beauty and a chief part of the truth of 
the object he attempts to delineate. Still a school-chart of 
the Connecticut is better than no map of it at all, and a des- 
perately foreshortened account of this Church's experiences 
may be preferable to none. 

I am comforted, furthermore, in forecasting the deficiencies 
of the present discourse, by remembering that other papers, 
to be presented on special topics connected with our Church, 
will in a considerable degree supplement those deficiences, 
and discharge me of any present obligation to refer at length 
to the matters with which they are particularly to deal. Nor 
can it I think be inappropriate for me also to say, that fore- 
seeing the inevitable limitations of an anniversary discourse 
to tell adequately the tale which ought to be told, I have 
already in a state of large readiness for the press, and hope 
before many months to complete and to publish, a more 
detailed narrative of this First Church's history than any 



such occasion as this would give hearing for. And I refer 
to this the more freely at this time, as affording me opportu- 
nity to add that some statements of the present discourse, 
which may be more or less unexpected or counter to state- 
ments heretofore made by others, I shall in those more leis- 
urely pages undertake to verify ; leaving them here simply as 
statements, invoking only a suspension of judgment till the 
promised evidence be produced. 

It is therefore but to a very compressed and birds-eye view 
of this story of two hundred and fifty years, that I now a 
little while invite you. 

On the nth of October, 1633, Rev. Thomas Hooker and 
Rev. Samuel Stone, both ministers of repute in England, 
who had landed in Boston from the same ship which brought 
Rev. John Cotton and Mr. John Haynes the 14th of Sep- 
tember previous, were ordained, respectively, Pastor and 
Teacher of a Church of Christ at Newtown, now Cambridge, 
Massachusetts. The Church over which they were thus set 
had in all probability been organized at an earlier day, and 
quite likely the previous autumn, as the congregation who 
mainly composed it had been established in a house of wor- 
ship "with a bell upon it" in Newtown sometime in 1632. 
This probable earlier period of church-gathering accounts for 
Winthrop's silence respecting any such important event as 
the gathering of the Church, in his account of the ordination 
of its officers, and corresponds with Johnson's designation of 
it as the eighth in order in New England ; a position in rela- 
tion to others of which there appears no adequate evidence 
that this Church should be deprived, and which carries its 
birthday some months, and perhaps a year, back of that first 
distinctly recorded date which we celebrate to-day. The 
silence of Winthrop respecting the institution of any other 
officers than the Pastor and Teacher, makes the suggestion 
reasonable that William Goodwin, who had arrived with sev- 
eral other prominent members of the Church on September 
i6th of 1632, had been inducted into his office of Ruling Elder 
at a previous date, and perhaps at the formation of the 
Church. 



5 

But whenever gathered, this Newtown Church doubtless 
proceeded substantially after the same manner as did the 
other early churches of Massachusetts Bay. These churches 
were all of them formed of men and women who had been 
members of the English Establishment. Few of them had 
been, in their own land, distinctly Separatists in principle. 
Many of them could have lived always in the communion of 
the church of their birth, if a few points of its polity could 
have been reformed in consonance with their convictions. 
They were Puritans, not Separates. Still, three thousand 
miles of watery distance, and the homogeneous quality of a 
wilderness society, were great facts which could not be with- 
out influence in shaping the new ecclesiastical framework of 
their religious life. The example, and the direct influence 
also of the avowedly Separatist church of Plymouth, had not 
been inoperative. In the gathering of the church of Salem 
in 1629, which in a manner set a pattern for all the others in 
the Bay, that agency is distinctly traceable. And in the 
case of this particular Newtown Church it is quite certain, 
furthermore, that however it may have been with the mem- 
bership iji general, the Pastor had come from his exile in 
Holland, and the Teacher from his Puritan Lectureship in 
England, with quite definitely pronounced convictions of the 
competency of every congregation of Christian people to 
constitute themselves into a church, and to appoint the 
officers they supposed demanded by Scripture. 

The particular manner of this self-erection of a band of 
Christians into a church body-politic, was the solemn adop- 
tion of a Covenant, by which visible document of agreement 
and sacred confederation, the signers regarded themselves 
as made into a Church of Christ, having all necessary powers 
of admission, discipline, choice of officers, and ordination of 
them to their appointed work. 

The form of words constituting the Newtown church- 
covenant is unknown. It has shared the fatality which has 
buried the entire documentary records of this Church's first 



fifty-two years — the most important years to have preserved — 
in obHvion. 

What its phraseology, what the nature of its stipulations, 
who precisely were its signers, how many, in what order, 
how nearly it may have agreed with formulas which appear 
from time to time on the records subsequently, in substantial 
identity, till the adoption, within the lifetime of some of its 
present membership, of a formal Confession of Faith and 
Covenant, of modern and somewhat clumsy type, in 1822 — 
all these things are to a degree uncertain. 

The document, however, was not likely to be essentially 
different from several others of that period which time has 
spared to us, and of which the covenant of the Boston church, 
adopted about two years before, is an example. And the 
names of the signers, at least the male portion of them, can 
be, for the greater part, sufficiently determined from contem- 
poraneous and shortly subsequent civil records. 

The signers were a company of men and women mainly 
from a region a little to the north and east of London, and 
chiefly from the county of Essex, who with a few others 
joined with them had left England under the primary 
impulse of a desire for liberty to worship and serve God as 
conscience commanded them. 

They had to some considerable extent been acquainted 
with one another, and especially with the Pastor newly 
ordained over them ; having lived, many of them, in the near 
vicinage of Braintree and Chelmsford where his fame was a 
household word. The strengthening spirit of prelatical 
authority significantly represented in the person of Arch- 
bishop Laud, who as bishop of London had a considerable 
time held them under his severe diocesan sway, left them 
little hope that the liberties they had come to deem essential 
to Christ's freemen could any longer have scope in Eng- 
land. One after another of the ancient Papistic usages 
which they supposed the Reformation to have abolished was 
reimposed upon them by the harmoniously co-operant author- 
ity of the bishop and the king. One after another of their 



accepted preachers was silenced and exiled. Some of them 
were imprisoned and pilloried. The prospect for themselves 
and their children was darkening daily. It is not strange 
that in this condition of affairs they turned to the New 
World as their only hope. 

Some time in 1632 a considerable number of them left 
their homes, and, arrived in New England, began "to sit 
down at Mt. Wollaston " in the township now known as 
Qaincy. These were by " order of court," in August of that 
year, removed to Newtown. Governor Winthrop, in record- 
ing the event on the 14th of the month, calls them by the 
double appellation of the '* Braintree Company " and " Mr. 
Hooker's Company." Mr. Hooker was then in Holland and 
did not arrive for thirteen months afterward, which of itself 
suggests the fact corroborated in other ways, that the people 
gathered in the Newtown church-fellowship were a special 
companionship, having, many of them, recognized relations 
of obligation and expectancy, long before he arrived, to the 
Pastor who was on the nth of October, 1633, set over them. 

The Pastor who at that time was "ordained" was a man 
who had already exercised a ministry of thirteen or more 
years, had received Episcopal ordination in the English 
Church, and had stood in practical paStoral connection with 
several Christian congregations. His transcendent abilities 
and his fatherly relationship to this Church and colony demand 
that even in a cursory sketch like the present, some space be 
given to his imposing figure. 

Thomas Hooker was born at the little township of Marfield, 
in Leicester Co., England ; it is believed on July 7, 1586. 
The parish records of Tilton parish-church, to which Marfield 
ecclesiastically belongs, are non-existent previous to 1610, 
and do not therefore contain the entry of his baptism. They 
contain, however, the record of the burial of his father, 
mother, and eldest brother ; which last, dying childless, and 
leaving bequests to his brother Thomas' sons in America, 
causes the name henceforth to vanish from Tilton memorials. 

Marfield is a little hamlet of only five houses (having had 



8 

six twenty-two years before Hooker's birth) lying in a 
pleasant valley a mile and a half north from Tilton hill. 
With the exception of the one vanished dwelling, some old 
oak timbers of which still remain, the scene is probably not 
appreciably different from what it was when looked at through 
young Thomas' eyes. Still the sweet fields smile with 
luxuriant harvests around, and still the most prominent object 
to arrest the eye is the stately church of St. Peter's at " Tilton 
super montem," whose peal of six bells rings out now as it 
did then from the arches of its beautiful spire. In this really 
noble church edifice, rising above the thatch-covered village 
that clusters about the crown of the hill on which it stands, 
and tenanted here and there by monumental effigies of great 
personages of the parish back to early in the twelfth century, 
young Hooker doubtless was baptized, in the font which can 
still be seen, and gained his earliest impressions of public 
worship. 

From his humble home at Marfield he went at about 
fourteen years of age to the newly established preparatory 
school of Market-Bosworth, about twenty-five miles west- 
ward from his birthplace. It was probably while he was at 
this school, and about a year before leaving it for the 
university, that the great and termagant Queen Elizabeth 
died, and the uncouth and polemic James succeeded to the 
monarchy. 

Cotton Mather says Hooker's parents " were neither unable 
nor unwilling to bestow upon him a liberal education," which 
may in part be true; but he was matriculated "Sizar" of 
Queen's College, Cambridge, on March 27, "1604, the title 
signifying a certain inferiority at least, of pecuniary resources. 
He was however, soon, at some unascertainable date, trans- 
ferred to Emmanuel college, where he took his degree A. B., 
in January, 1608, and A. M. in 161 1. 

Here at Emmanuel, in the very focus of Puritanism in 
that most exciting period, he resided as undergraduate and 
afterward as Fellow on Sir Wolstan Dixie's foundation, from 
about his eighteenth to his twenty-eighth or thirtieth and 



possibly even thirty-second year. These were great years in 
English history. They covered the events of the gunpowder 
plot, the exile of Robinson and his Scrooby church to Hol- 
land, the forcing of Episcopacy by the whilom Presbyterian 
James into Scotland, the dissolution of James' parliaments, 
the negotiations for the marriage of prince Charles with the 
Spanish Infanta, the execution of Raleigh, the outbreak of 
the Protestant and Catholic struggle of the Thirty-years' war, 
the planting of Plymouth Colony in America. 

But somewhere in this period came to Hooker a greater 
personal event than any of them, his individual spiritual con- 
version. This experience was preceded and accompanied 
in his case with the intensest perturbations of soul, which 
probably lent something of vigor, and it may be of somber- 
ness and severity, to some of his after religious views of the 
necessary processes of spiritual change. 

He appears after this transcendent event in his history, to 
have fulfilled certain catechetical and lecturing functions at 
the university ; but about 1620 he became rector of the dona- 
tive parish of Esher in Surrey, a little place sixteen miles 
west from London. Here he married his wife Susannah, a 
" waiting gentlewoman " of a Mr. Drake who was the donor 
of the parish living. 

From hence, after some ineffectual attempts to secure his 
establishment at Colchester in Essex, he went, apparently 
sometime in 1625 or 1626 to Chelmsford, also in Essex, as 
Lecturer at St. Mary's church, of which Rev. John Michael- 
son was rector. These Puritan lectureships were an out- 
growth of the religious movement of the age, and were 
designed to secure a more efficient preaching service than 
could often be had from the legal incumbent of the parish. 
From this beautiful church of St. Mary's, Hooker's influence 
radiated through all the adjacent country. Throngs flocked 
from all quarters to listen to his words. His per.sonal power 
over those brought in conference with him was immense. 

These facts soon attracted the attention of Laud, then 
bishop of the diocese, and Mr. Hooker was forced, sometime 



lO 

late in 1629, against the remonstrance in his behalf of a 
large body of Conformist ministers of Essex county, to lay 
down his ministry. Thus silenced, he removed from Chelms- 
ford to Little Baddow, four miles away, and taught a school, 
having John Eliot, afterwards the Apostle Eliot and who 
was converted in his family, as assistant. But his influence 
still haunted the region. Conference with him was still 
possible and was dreaded by the authorities. Sometime early 
in 1630 he was cited to appear before the High Commission 
court, but convinced of the bodily danger of doing so, he 
forfeited his bonds with the consent of his sureties, and after 
a narrow escape from his pursuers got off for Holland. 

Arrived in Holland Mr. Hooker preached temporarily at 
Amsterdam, then nearly two years at Delft, and afterward 
awhile at Rotterdam. Here he united with the celebrated 
Dr. Ames in the authorship of a volume, published in 1633, 
entitled " A Fresh Suit against Human Ceremonies in God's 
Worship." While thus laboring in Holland, overtures were 
made to him by some of his former Essex County hearers 
to accompany or follow them into America. Attempts were 
made to join him with Rev. John Cotton in the same enter- 
prise. These attempts failed, but overtures being success- 
fully made to another to become his assistant, Mr. Hooker 
crossed to England, narrowly escaped arrest, embarked on 
the Griffin, and on Sept. 4, 1633, reached Boston, whence he 
soon joined the waiting flock at Newtown, with the Apostolic 
salutation, " Now I live if ye stand fast in the Lord." 
' The other minister who was secured as assistant to Mr. 
Hooker in the New England enterprise was Rev. Samuel 
Stone. Mr. Stone was born at Hertford (commonly pro- 
nounced Harford), in Hertfordshire, England, and baptized 
at the church of All Saints, July 30, 1602. He was probably 
prepared for the university at Hale's Grammar School in his 
native town, and was matriculated pensioner at Emmanuel 
College, April 19, 1620. He took his A.B. degree in 1624, 
and his A.M. in 1627. These university years of Stone, 
also, were great years in English history. They saw the 



II 

departure of the Pilgrims, the accession of Charles First, the 
marriage with Henrietta Maria, the reception of Laud as the 
King's chief ecclesiastical adviser, the levy of Charles' first 
forced loan, the degradation of Chief Justice Crewe, the 
disastrous issue of the siege of Rochelle. 

After leaving the university, Mr. Stone studied divinity 
awhile in the very peculiar and interesting theological school 
of Rev. Richard Blackerby, an eminent Puritan divine, who 
" not being capable of a benefice because he could not 
subscribe," amid a good deal of tribulation, boarded and 
educated divinity students for twenty-three years. 

From this school, at Aspen in Essex, Stone went, in 1630, 
as Puritan lecturer to Towcester in Northamptonshire, 
recommended thereto by Thomas Shepard, some years after- 
ward Mr. Hooker's son-in-law and pastor of the church at 
Newtown which was formed after the departure of this Church 
to Hartford. It was while successfully occupying this Tow- 
cester lectureship, and doubtless in view of his recognized 
learning and powers, that the proposals were made to Mr. 
Stone which brought him into connection with Mr. Hooker 
and with the Church to which he was to bear the relation of 
Teacher. A quick-witted, resourceful, able man, his adroit- 
ness saved Mr. Hooker from arrest just before their embarka- 
tion, and there is no evidence that their intimate relationship 
was not an occasion of satisfaction to them always, y 

Set thus in their appointed positions as practical and doc- 
trinal expounders of the Gospel, and ordained probably by 
the laying on of the hands of William Goodwin, and some 
two or three lay brethren of the Church, and having chosen 
Andrew Warner, and possibly some one beside. Deacon, 
the Newtown Church was, after the Congregational way, 
a fully equipped organization, and was ready for the Lord's 
work. And when autumnal days really settled down in 
1633 upon the little town, William Wood, writing this same 
year, was able to describe the Newtown village as " one of 
the neatest and best compacted towns in New England." 

But Newtown was not destined to be long the home of this 



12 

Christian companionship. There was, all along from very 
near the arrival of the Griffin's company with Mr. Hooker, 
Mr. Cotton, Mr. Haynes, and Mr. Stone, a certain uneasiness 
in respect to the Newtown location, all the causes of which 
are somewhat difficult to trace, but which are more or less 
distinctly indicated in various documentary records. 

It was only seven months after the induction of Mr. 
Hooker into the pastorate, that the people of " Newtown 
complained. May, 1634, of straitness for want of land, espe- 
cially meadow, and desired leave of the Court to look out 
either for enlargement or removal." Unadjusted at this 
time, the matter again came before the Court in September, 
at which time the argument for removal, and to Connecticut 
as the objective point, had reached this degree of definiteness 
in statement: " i. Their want of accommodation for their 
cattle, so as they were not able to maintain their ministers, 
nor could receive any more of their friends to help them. . . . 
2. The fruitfulness and commodiousness of Connecticut, 
and the danger of having it possessed by others, Dutch or 
English. 3. The strong bent of their spirits to remove 
thither." The matter was excitedly discussed. The very 
" reverend and godly " William Goodwin, the Ruling Elder of 
the congregation at Newtown," was rebuked for ''unreverend 
speech " in open Court. A grant of enlargement, embracing 
the territory now known as the towns of Brookline, Brighton, 
Newtown, and Arlington was made. There was hoped to be 
an amicable adjustment. 

But it did not last. The " strong bent " of the Newtown 
people's spirits to " remove " continued. The territorial ques- 
tion could not have been the only question. They were 
perhaps a hundred and twenty families. The population on 
the same soil is now upwards of seventy thousand souls. 
Other causes than lack of ground in five townships to pas- 
ture the few cattle of Newtown's third summer, must have 
conspired to create this restlessness. What were they.'' 
The historian Hubbard, writing within fifty years of these 
events, and Dr. Benjamin Trumbull in his account long sub- 



13 

sequently of the death of Mr. Haynes, both intimate that 
considerations respecting the relative influence of the chief 
leaders of the two towns, Boston and Newtown (Winthrop 
and Cotton in the one, and Haynes and Hooker in the other) 
had something more to do with the matter than territorial 
ones. Some good people have been quite horrified at this. 
But horrifying or not this was probably the case. 

Nor do I see anything in it to apologize for. The New- 
town people were in a remarkable degree a homogeneous 
company, acquainted with one another and with their Pastor 
in the old country. The came into the pre-existing commu- 
nity of the Bay with something of the distinct character of 
a body corporate. Their views of civil policy were from the 
outset somewhat different from theirs who preceded them. 
Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker were too positively marked 
characters, however friendly, always wholly to harmonize ; 
and there were some special provocations, if not to jealousy 
at least to willingness to move in less closely parallel paths, 
attending the tumult made in the colony about " Mr. Cotton 
his sitting down," who had been once applied to as Mr. 
Hooker's assistant or colleague in the American enterprise. 

Add to this, that already, in 1635, the theological differ- 
ences, which afterward developed into such prominence over 
the views of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, and in reference to 
which Cotton and Hooker were to a degree antagonized, 
began to show some of their earlier and unhappy results, and 
it is not strange that with the sense of competency to their 
own affairs within them, and the sight of the sweet meadows 
of the Connecticut a hundred miles away alluring them, their 
" strong bent " to go should at last prevail. It did prevail. 
Some of them came in the autumn of 1635, suffering 
immense hardship in the following winter of prolonged and 
almost unparalleled severity. 

But the greater part delayed their pilgrimage till spring. 
They sold their Newtown habitations to the congregation of 
Rev. Thomas Shepard, who occupied the vacated village. 



14 

And on the thirty-first of May, 1636, they set out on their 
journey. 

It is the season in our New England climate when the 
landscape has just- burst into verdure. The streams run 
full with the melted snows of winter. The ground is spotted 
with the anemone and wild violet. The days are alive with 
promise, but the nights, though short, are damp and chill. 
The Newtown pilgrims struck out into the unpathwayed 
woods. Their guides were the compass and the northern 
star. Evening by evening they made camp and slept senti- 
neled by the blazing fires. One of their number, the pastor's 
wife, was carried on a litter because of her infirmity. 

The lowing of a hundred and sixty cattle sounding through 
the forest aisles, not to mention the bleating of goats and 
the squealing of swine, summoned them to each morning's 
advance. 

The day began and ended with the voice of prayer. At 
some point of their fortnight's journey a Sabbath intervened, 
when the camp rested and the people listened to the exhorta- 
tions of their ministers and joined in solemn psalm. Their 
toilsome and devious way led them near the mouth of the 
f Chicopee, close by where now stands Springfield. Thence 
was a comparatively easy pathway. Meadow lands were in 
sight always. 

The wide, full river, flowing with a larger tide than now, 
was crossed on rafts and rude constructed boats ; and on the 
soil where we now stand, cheered by the sight of some 
pioneer attempts at settlement made, by those of their num- 
ber who had come the season previous, the Ark of the First 
Church of Hartford rested, and the weary pilgrims who bore 
it hither stood still. 

Arrived upon the grounds one of the earliest transactions 
of the new comers was the purchase of the land from the 
Indians. This seems to have been done in 1636, and Rev. 
Samuel Stone and Elder William Goodwin were the agents in 
the negotiation. The territory embraced in the purchase 
was about coincident with the territory subsequently known 
as the township of Hartford. 



IS 

The portion needed for the immediate uses of the little 
village was parceled out into lots covering most of the older 
portions of this city: those assigned to the Pastor, the 
Teacher, and the Ruling Elder fronted on the Little River ; 
Mr. Goodwin's being on the corner of what is now Arch and 
Main Streets ; Mr. Stone's next eastward, and Mr. Hooker's 
beyond Mr. Stone's. Dea. Andrew Warner's lot lay across 
the Little River opposite Mr. Stone's. 

The central point of interest in an ecclesiastical point of 
view was of course the Meeting-House. This was situated 
on Meeting-House Yard, a tract of territory covering the 
ground now known as State House Square, and of somewhat 
larger extent, especially on the northern and southern sides. 
Here, somewhere on the portion now covered by the build- 
ings of Central Row, a temporary structure first afforded a 
meeting place for public worship. This, within about four 
years, gave place to another destined to fill its purpose nearly 
one hundred years, situated on the east side of the square, 
near the corner made by the road leading down to the Con- 
necticut River ; a spot coinciding nearly enough with the 
vacant space just west of the American House or its Hall. 
Not far from the meeting-house, on the same public square, 
were those other more secular conservators of public welfare, 
the jail, the stocks, and whipping-post. The first burial place 
of the dead — for men and women would die amid all the 
hopes of a new colony on a fresh planted continent — lay on 
the northerly side of Meeting-House Yard, westward upon 
or above the site of the present City Building, The spot 
was formerly higher than now, and its leveling removed alike 
monuments and graves. 

The first rude church, however, was hardly built and the 
plain dwellings of the pilgrims made habitable, before it 
became necessary to fight for home and life. It was only 
May, 1637, when the expedition against the Pequots, led by 
Captain John Mason, took place ; a really heroic and notable 
enterprise, in which Mr. Stone went with the small army as 
chaplain, while Mr. Hooker as an encouragement declared 
3 



i6 

to the departing brothers and sons of the anxious little com- 
monwealth, that " the Pequots should be bread for them." 
The result was as the Pastor prophesied, and the Pequot's 
power was permanently broken. 

It a little revolts modern feeling, however, to find Mr. 
Ludlow and Mr. Pynchon and several other presumably 
good Christians carrying to Boston shortly after, the skins 
and scalps of the vanquished " Sassacus and his brother, and 
five other Pequot sachems, who, being fled to the Mohawks 
for shelter . . . were by them surprised and slain." Even 
in that hard age there was one man, Roger Williams, who 
said, " Those dead hands were no pleasing sight." 

But even the exigencies of war and wilderness could not 
divert the attention of those pioneers of the church from 
questions of theology. 

On the fifth of August following the Pequot slaughter in 
May, Mr. Hooker and Mr. Stone arrived in Boston, through 
the forests from Hartford — or Newtown, as Hartford was 
still called in accordance with the Massachusetts name — to 
attend an ecclesiastical council concerning the peculiar doc- 
trines promulgated by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and her brother- 
in-law, Mr. Wheelwright, which had thrown the Bay Colony 
in general, and Boston church in particular, into ferment. 
Mr. Ludlow, Mr. Pynchon, and others who carried the 
Pequot skins and scalps along with them, went as delegates 
on the same business. 

The churches of the entire colony were turmoiled. Mr. 
Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, and Mr. Cotton, its 
teacher, had for some months been regarded as taking differ- 
ent sides. Public fasts had been appointed in January and 
July previous, in view of the dissensions in the churches. 
In May, some of the Massachusetts soldiers, called out in 
the Pequot matter, had declined to go with Mr. Wilson as 
chaplain, alleging that he was " under a covenant of works." 

The civil government had shifted hands on the issues 
involved. Governor Vane losing his election and returning to 
England. In this condition of things a Synod was called. 



17 

to which the representatives of the scarce-rooted Connecticut 
churches went. The sessions lasted twenty-two days. Rev. 
Peter Bulkley of Concord and Mr. Hooker of Hartford were 
moderators. As a result of the deliberations, eighty-two 
opinions more or less intimately connected with Mrs. 
Hutchinson's teachings were condemned as, " some, blas- 
phemous, others erroneous, and all unsafe." It was further 
resolved with special reference to Mrs. Hutchinson's Bible- 
reading meetings, that though females meeting " some few 
together" for prayer and edification might be allowed, yet 
that "a set assembly where sixty or more did meet every 
week, and one woman took on her the whole exercise " was 
" disorderly and without rule." The assembly broke up on 
the 22d of September, and so Mr. Hooker and Mr. Stone had 
chance to go back to Hartford after more than two months' 
absence, during which time, doubtless, Ruling Elder Good- 
win had "exercised by way of prophecy" in their place. 

The following year, 1638, witnessed the preliminary pro- 
ceedings, very imperfectly recorded, of the formulation of 
that body of Fundamental Law, drawn up at the direction of 
the Court by Roger Ludlow, which has been called by Dr. 
Leonard Bacon the "first written constitution in the history of 
nations." But our chief interest in the matter on this occasion 
is not a historic one, looked at from the point of civil admin- 
istration. The interest as connected with this Church is 
two-fold. It is, first, that the form of government here in 
distinct prescription established, was simply an extension to 
the domain of secular affairs of the principles already adopted 
in religious matters — the mutual covenant and agreement of 
those associated, as under God the ultimate law. And 
second, and more particularly, because of the agency in 
establishing this principle, of the wise and far-sighted Pastor 
of this Church. We are indebted for the discovery of defin- 
ite evidence of this agency, to the skill and research of our 
distinguished antiquarian townsman. Dr. J. H. Trumbull. The 
evidence lay undiscovered more than two and a quarter cen- 
turies in a little almost undecipherable manuscript volume, 



i8 

written by a young man in our neighbor town of Windsor. 
In it is found an abstract of Mr, Hooker's lecture given on 
May 31, 1638. The doctrine laid down in the discourse is, 
"That the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the 
people by God's own allowance. . . . That they who have 
the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their 
power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power 
and place to which they call them." 

The preacher declares that " the foundation of authority 
is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people ; " and the 
" use " which he derived from the principles laid down was 
an exhortation to take the liberty they had in their power 

Dr. Bacon says, " That sermon by Thomas Hooker from 
the pulpit of the First Church of Hartford is the earliest 
known suggestion of a fundamental law, enacted not by royal 
charter, nor by concession from any previously existing 
government, but by the people themselves — a primary and 
supreme law by which the government is constituted, and 
which not only provides for the free choice of magistrates by 
the people but also ' sets the bounds and limitations of the 
power and place to which' each magistrate is called." Eight 
months later the Fundamental Laws embodying these princi- 
ples were "sentenced, ordered, and decreed." It is impossi- 
ble not to recognize the Master-hand. It diminishes nothing 
of the proper honor of Roger Ludlow to say that the Pastor 
of the Hartford Church was Connecticut's great legislator 
also. 

In the May following the adoption of the new Constitution 
in January, 1639, Mr. Hooker and Mr. Ha3mes, the governor, 
were in Boston on the business of a treaty of confederation 
with Massachusetts ; and the same year saw the organization 
of the church at New Haven, where the tradition is that Mr. 
Hooker and Mr. Stone were present as representatives of the 
Hartford Church. 

Meanwhile events were onmoving in England. The par- 
liament, known as the Long Parliament, began its session in 
1640. Laud, who had been the chief agent in driving out of 



19 

the old country a large part of the ministers in the new, was 
himself imprisoned in 1641. The king- or the parliament was 
to break. The ecclesiastical constitution shared the general 
disorder. Presbyterianism, Episcopacy, Independency, were 
all eagerly contended for, though by parties having very 
unequal numerical strength. In this state of affairs a 
General Assembly was ordered by Parliament, and being 
contemplated the American exiles were not forgotten. Mr. 
Cotton of Boston, Mr. Davenport of New Haven, and Mr. 
Hooker of Hartford, were sent to by the Earl of Warwick, 
Oliver Cromwell, and some thirty-seven other Independent 
members of parliament, to " assist in the synod." Mr, Cotton 
and Mr. Davenport inclined to go. Mr. Hooker, with 
characteristic sagacity discerning the numerical weakness of 
the Independent interest in the assembly as it was actually 
constituted, declined. The matter fell through with all the 
American divines, and the event proved anew the accuracy 
of the Hartford Pastor's judgment. 

The English Assembly issued a Presbyterian platform, 
This fact gave new encouragement to a few eminent minis- 
ters in Massachusetts colony whose views favored that form 
of church policy. Fearful of the spread of such views to the 
subversion of the " congregational way," it was deemed best 
to hold a synod in Cambridge to emphasize Independent 
principles. The synod met in September, 1643, ^^d was com- 
posed of " all the elders in the country," about fifty in 
number. Here again, as in 1637, Mr. Hooker, joined this 
time with Mr. Cotton, was one of the moderators. 

But apparently the conclusions were not conclusive. The 
party of Presbyterianism grew. A meeting was held at 
Cambridge, July i, 1645, at which it was agreed to send 
over to England for publication certain books in reply to the 
Presbyterian arguments, which had been written by ministers 
here. Among these books were Davenport's answer to 
Paget known as the " Power of Congregational Churches," 
and Hooker's " Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline " 
in reply to Rutherford's " Due Right of Presbyteries." The 



20 

first copies of these books were lost in the vessel which sailed 
from New Haven in January, 1646, and never heard of more, 
save in the phantom of it which appeared two years and five 
months afterward, and which John Davenport declared was 
sent for the comfort of surviving friends of the vanished crew. 
The books, thus lost, were laboriously rewritten, again sent, 
and published ; Hooker's, however, not printed till after his 
death. Of Mr. Hooker's Survey of Church Discipline it can 
here only be said, that with far more of erudition and histori- 
cal learning, it divides with John Cotton's " Keyes " the place 
of chief authority in early Congregational literature. 

By May of 1646, the peril of a subversion of ecclesiastical 
usages seemed so great that Massachusetts summoned the 
synod which had passed into history as the Cambridge 
Synod, and the promulgator of the Platform of that name. 
The synod met on the ist of September, for its first fort- 
night's session. Mr. Stone was present, but Mr. Hooker 
was not there. He wrote a letter to his son-in law Shepherd 
excusing himself on account of age and infirmities. The 
synod adjourned until June 8th of the following year. 
Regathered at that date it was almost immediately adjourned 
again by reason of an epidemic throughout New England. 

The sickness was very severe in Hartford. Many of the 
citizens died of it. One of them Treasurer William Whit- 
ing. But its most shining mark was the Pastor of this 
Church. Governor Winthrop in his diary records : " That 
which made the stroke more sensible and grievous both to 
them [of Connecticut] and to all the country was the death 
of that faithful servant of the Lord, Mr. Thomas Hooker, 
pastor of the church in Hartford, who for piety, prudence, 
wisdom, zeal, learning, and what else might make him 
serviceable in the place and time he lived in, might be com- 
pared with men of greatest note; and he shall need no other 
praise ; the fruits of his labors in both Englands shall pre- 
serve an honorable and happy remembrance of him for ever." 
This wise and eloquent eulogy cannot receive at this time, 
and needs scarcely at any time, any amplification. Some 



21 

twenty-three volumes, mainly of sermons and expositions, 
remain to us from Mr. Hooker's hand. They give us, in 
their vivacity, pungency, and power, a little glimpse of the 
majestic man. His theology was of the sternest Calvinistic 
type. He was a " Hopkinsian before Hopkins." But min- 
gled with all his sternness and strength is a beauty and 
felicity most unusual to his time, unexampled among his 
New England associates. In extent of learning probably 
none of them but John Norton could compare with him. 
He was a man of whom it was said that " on the Lord's 
business he could put a king in his pocket." 

Mr. Hooker died July 7, 1647, at the age of sixty-one, and 
it is said on the anniversary of his birth. His mortal part 
lies mouldered back to dust just behind this church. His 
memory is that of one of the best and greatest of men. 

Upon the death of Mr. Hooker the Church does not seem 
to have contemplated the possibility of long continuing with- 
out another minister. Mr. Stone was only forty-four years 
old, but the theory of the dual ministry with which the New 
England churches had begun, was not yet worn out. So 
measures were at once taken to secure a successor to the 
late Pastor. 

The seed planted in the founding of Harvard College in 
1636 had already begun to bear fruit. And the first man to 
whom the Hartford Church turned was Jonathan Mitchell, 
still a student there. Mr. Mitchell, however, was not 
destined to become pastor of the Hartford congregation, 
although promptly and earnestly invited. He speedily after 
settled in Cambridge, and died comparatively young, but 
leaving an illustrious name in New England history. 

Neither was Michael Wigglesworth so destined, nor John 
Davis his classmate, nor John Cotton, son of the famous 
Boston John, who for quite a protracted period lived at 
Hartford, studied divinity with Mr. Stone, and ministered to 
the congregation. 

Michael Wigglesworth's candidacy, at different times in 
1653 and 1654 (for such his diary shows it to have been) 



22 

may, however, be mentioned as probably affording the most 
distinctly recognizable provoking occasion of the series of 
events which give to the next few years of this Church's his- 
tory its chief and melancholy interest. This period, from 
about six years after Mr. Hooker's death to about four years 
before the death of Mr. Stone, or from 1654 to 1659 inclu- 
sive, is remembered mainly for a quarrel in the Hartford 
Church, of such virulence, contagiousness, and publicity, that 
it attracted the attention of all the churches in New England, 
and occupies a large place in every history of early ecclesi- 
astical affairs in this country. 

Into the perplexing and prolonged details of this contro- 
versy it would be utterly impossible to enter on this occasion 
with any minuteness, though I have elsewhere endeavored to 
follow it out in all ascertainable accuracy. It is a controversy 
which Cotton Mather and Dr. Benjamin Trumbull and Dr. 
Leonard Bacon have all spoken of as obscure, even to the 
point of being almost incomprehensible. But this conclusion 
of these eminent historians I am convinced was owing chiefly 
to two causes. First, a generous unwillingness on their part 
to recognize the largely personal element in the controversy, 
arising from the contact and conflict of the two very pro- 
nounced individualities of Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Stone ; and 
second and mainly, the absence from their knowledge of the 
contents of certain documents only comparatively recently 
discovered and published, which afford help in the solution of 
the trouble, of the very greatest assistance. 

It has been customary in the attempts which have been 
made to explain this unhappy passage in the Church's history, 
to ascribe a very large agency in it to the agitation of the ques- 
tions concerning Baptism, and the rights of children of bap- 
tized persons who were not communicants, — questions which 
began, certainly, to be mooted before this period, and which 
not long after this period came to open conflict, resulting in 
the rupture of this Church in 1670. But it may well be 
questioned whether the influence of this factor in the quar- 
rel in Stone's day has not been very much exaggerated, if 



23 

indeed it can be said to have perceptibly existed at all. Not 
one of the twenty-one contemporaneous documents, of various 
object and authorship, among the newly discovered manu- 
scripts published by the Connecticut Historical Society in 
1870, speaks of this matter of Baptism as in any way an 
issue in debate ; a fact utterly impossible to account for, not 
to say utterly impossible in itself,, had the rights of church- 
membership based on Baptism been a recognized feature of 
the controversy. And even a careful reading of the historian 
Trumbull, who wrote in ignorance of these much-illuminating 
papers, will show that he conceived the agitation of the Bap- 
tism question to have been not of the substance of the quar- 
rel, but, as he says, a matter of " meanwhile," and for which 
certain parties " took this opportunity." 

Believing thus that any treatment of the quarrel which 
resulted in Elder Goodwin's party leaving Plartford for Had- 
ley, consistent with the documents in the case, must proceed 
substantially independent of that other discussion concerning 
baptismal rights which to some extent ran parallel with this, 
continued after it, and finally resulted in the separation of 
the Second Church of Hartford from the First, I shall here 
only indicate in the barest way what sorts of events they 
were which thus turmoiled the peace, not only of this Zion, 
but involved in it, all our New England Israel. 

All accounts agree that the quarrel commenced in an 
antagonism between Teaching Elder Stone and Ruling Elder 
Goodwin. There is a high degree of probability that its 
first recognizable point of outbreak, and perhaps its very 
occasion, was the refusal of Mr. Stone to allow the Church to 
vote on Mr. Michael Wigglesworth's " fitness for office in ye 
church of Hartford," thus infringing, as Mr. Goodwin claimed, 
on the " rights of the brotherhood." 

As the quarrel progressed it was attended by such inci- 
dents as these : the indignant resignation of his office by 
Mr. Stone, yet his after resumption of its functions as if 
he had not resigned ; the practical deposition of Mr. Good- 
win, the Ruling Elder, from his functions by the Church's 
4 



24 

choice of a "moderator" to preside in its meetings; the 
withdrawal of Mr. Goodwin and his sympathizers from com- 
munion with the majority who adhered to Mr. Stone ; the 
commencement of processes of discipline by the Church 
against the withdrawing party for so doing ; the summons of 
an ecclesiastical council, composed of churches of this colony 
and of New Haven ; and then of another of churches of 
Massachusetts, their messengers traveling through the far 
wilderness, before whom each party pleaded its case ; pub- 
lic days of humiliation and prayer appointed by the Massa- 
chusetts churches in behalf of the Hartford Church and for 
the success of the council ; the interposition of the General 
Court with repeated well-meant and blundering endeavors at 
reconciliation ; the aggravation rather than the healing of 
the strife ; the final review of the whole matter and " Deter- 
mination " thereupon by a council at Boston, after a ten days' 
session, in September and October, 1659 '■> ^^^ acceptance of 
the " sentence " by both parties, and the removal of Elder 
Goodwin and most of the minority party to Hadley, — these, 
in the rapidest and most meager outlines, were the main 
features of the first great quarrel in the Hartford Church. It 
began, probably, so far as anything visible was a beginning, 
in a question of personal preference for a pulpit candidate ; 
it found expression in a dispute touching the official preroga- 
tive of the two chief officers of the Church ; it broadened 
out as it went into a controversy concerning the claims of the 
brotherhood and the rights of a minority, and of the proper 
methods of securing ecclesiastical redress when those rights 
were infringed. It brought up many interesting questions 
of Congregational order, but the personal element was all 
along the baffling and potential quantity. 

Mr. Goodwin was a very able and reverend man. But we 
remember that before the Church left Massachusetts he had 
been reproved in open court for his " unreverend speech." 
And it may be fairly questioned whether the very vigor and 
pertinacity with which he exercised what he regarded as the 
proper functions of his ruling eldership, was not one of the 



25 

most persuasive arguments with the Church for never appoint- 
ing another. Certainly another never was appointed. 

Mr. Stone, too, was an exceedingly reverend and able man. 
But he obviously took very high views of the prerogatives of 
his office His conception of ministerial authority belonged 
more to the period in which he had been educated in Eng- 
land, than to the new era into which he had come in New 
England. His own graphic expression, " A speaking aristo- 
cracy in the face of a silent democracy," is the felicitous 
phrase which sets forth, at once, the view he took of church 
government, and the source of all his woes. On the whole, 
respecting the controversy itself which turmoiled the Church 
so long, the impartial verdict of history must be that, spite 
of many irregularities and doubtless a good deal of ill-temper 
on both sides, the general weight of right and justice was 
with the defeated and emigrating minority. 

Mr. Stone survived this passage in his experience about 
four years. They were years of apparent harmony in the 
Church and comfort to himself. He was a man of popular 
qualities and great conversational gifts, but he was also a 
man of the utmost sincerity and devout piety. The estima- 
tion in which he was held by his fellow-townsmen is shown 
in the very name our city bears ; the place of Mr. Stone's 
birth being chosen, rather than that of any other of its 
founder.s, as the name of the new home in the wilderness. 
He died July 20, 1663, at the same age as his more illustrious 
companion. Hooker — sixty-one years. And he sleeps beside 
him in the old cemetery. 

The year after the adjustment of the long quarrel, and 
three years before Mr. Stone's death, an associate minister 
was secured for him in the charge of this Church. 

Rev. John Whiting was ordained colleague with Mr. Stone, 
probably in 1660. He was the son of Mr. William Whiting, 
an early settler of the colony, and its treasurer. He was 
born in England, in 1635, but was educated at Harvard, 
graduating in 1653. He preached a while at Salem, Mass., 
but removed to Hartford to undertake the associate work of 
this Church of his childhood. 



26 

During the three years of Mr. Stone's survival, after Mr. 
Whiting's coming, the new minister seems to have performed 
the largest part of the work ; but at Mr. Stone's death the 
people were still too full of the primitive idea of a dual minis- 
try to think of devolving the work on Mr. Whiting alone. 
Consequently, almost immediately upon the death of the old 
Teacher, Rev. Joseph Haynes was invited to an associate 
ministry with Rev. John Whiting. 

Mr. Haynes, like Mr. Whiting, was a Hartford man. He 
was the son of Governor John Haynes ; was born about 1641, 
and graduated at Harvard College in 1658. He began his 
joint ministry with Mr. Whiting some time in 1664. 

Here, then, were two young men — Whiting at his settle- 
ment was twenty-five, and Haynes at his settlement, four 
years later, was twenty-three — of common associations and 
mutual fellowships in town and college, united in the pastoral 
care of a Church which was the miother of them both. What 
fairer prospect could appear for a happy and prolonged asso- 
ciate ministry } Nevertheless, two years after the settlement 
of the younger man, we find the two Pastors in open conflict, 
the Church divided into parties, an ecclesiastical warfare in 
lively progress, which in less than four years more resulted 
in the permanent rupture of the body known as the Church 
of Hartford into two separate religious organizations. 

A vivid picture of one scene of the drama in June, 1666, 
just when the sharper phase of the struggle was beginning, 
is preserved for us by the pen of Rev. John Davenport of 
New Haven. 

The curtain lifts on the spectacle of " yong Mr. Heynes " 
sending " 3 of his partie to tell Mr. Whiting that the next 
lecture-day he would preach about his way of baptizing, and 
would begin the practicing of it on that day." Lecture-day 
came. Mr. Haynes preached. "Water was prepared for 
Baptism," which Mr. Davenport says, " was never adminis- 
tered in a weeke day in that church before." But up stood 
the senior Pastor, Mr. Whiting, and, *' as his place and duty 
required, testify ed against it and refused to consent." A 



27 

wordy contest began. Rev. John Warham of Windsor, now 
an old man, and repentant of his seven years' practice of the 
way of baptizing which he now repudiated, was present, 
probably by request of the senior Pastor, Mr. Whiting. Pre- 
suming on the " common concernment to all the churches " 
of the matter in debate, he attempted to speak, but was 
" rudely hindered " by the exclamation, " What hath Mr. 
Warham to do to speake in our church matters." The meet- 
ing apparently broke up in disorder, but was followed by a 
challenge from the younger to the older Pastor for a public 
" dispute about it with Mr, Whiting the next Lecture day," — 
an ecclesiastical contest which probably came off according 
to programme, as Mr. Davenport says it was " agreed upon," 
but of which no account remains to us. 

This contest between Mr. Whiting and Mr. Haynes about 
baptism was only an incident in a general conflict of opinion 
and behavior in the New England churches at large, about 
this period. The subject can only be treated of on this 
occasion in the briefest manner. 

The original theory upon which the churches were gathered 
on this side of the Atlantic was the personal regenerate 
character of the membership. " Visible saints only are fit 
Matter appointed by God to make up a visible Church of 
Christ," was the language of Mr, Hooker, which may be 
said to express the generally accepted view of the primitive 
New England churches. But this view of the only proper 
constituency of the Christian Church, taken in connection 
with the very vigorous tests of personal experience which 
were deemed necessary to mark "visible saints," left a 
considerable number of people of good moral character, 
and some of real piety, outside any church fellowship, and 
destitute of a voice in the selection of a minister, whom 
nevertheless they were legally bound to support. And 
it left a growing body of young people in every com- 
munity who, having been baptized in infancy, were accounted 
in a manner church-members, but lacking the criteria of 
conscious regeneration, were deprived not only of an 



28 

invitation to the Lord's Supper, but of the privilege of 
presenting their children for baptism. The difficulty was a 
two-fold one, having reference to adult people never " con- 
federated " into the churches of New England, yet bound to 
support their ministers, and to the children of " confederating 
parents " who came to years of maturity and parenthood 
without the experiences which were regarded necessary to 
full participation in church privileges. 

Quite a number of the ministers of early New England 
foresaw trouble on this point and were disposed to take such 
a view of the church, and of the relationship of baptized 
persons to the church, as would meet at least that part of 
the difficulty which was experienced by parents who, having 
been themselves baptized but not admitted to the Lord's 
Supper, desired baptism for their children. So early as 1634 
the church of Boston, under the lead of John Cotton, 
advised the church of Dorchester that a grandfather might 
claim baptism for a grandchild, although the intermediate 
parents were not received into church covenant, — a posi- 
tion, however, which Mr. Hooker in his Survey distinctly 
repudiates. And it appears to be in evidence that the Ipswich 
church, in 1655, put on record a declaration that the children 
of adult parents " not scandalous " taking the covenant, should 
have their children baptized. The Dorchester church took 
similar action the same year. Salem, under the lead of Mr. 
Norris, debated and conceded the principle (though appar- 
ently delaying the practice) a year or two earlier still. 

Connecticut cannot therefore be charged with originating 
the new departure in enlarging the scope of baptism, although 
the earliest motion for an authoritative statement upon the 
subject did come from this colony. The matter was in the 
air. And the turmoiled condition of the Hartford Church, 
owing to the long quarrel between its officers, made this 
question all the more ready to arise. As Dr. Benjamin 
Trumbull says, " numbers of them took this opportunity to 
introduce into the Assembly a list of grievances on account 
of their being denied their just rights and privileges by the 



29 

ministers and churches." The ever ready General Court 
listened to the appeal. In February, 1656, it appointed Mr. 
Warham of Windsor, Mr. Stone of Hartford, Mr. Blinman 
of New London, and Mr. Russell of Wethersfield, delegates 
to a ministerial assembly called by Massachusetts at Boston 
to consider twenty-one questions concerning the matters in 
debate. The session of the ministers began June 4, 1657, 
and continued a fortnight. The answers they gave to Con- 
necticut's twenty-one questions were a substantial endorse- 
ment of the claim to baptism and so to church-membership, 
of all children of baptized parents " not scandalous " who 
themselves " own the covenant." This virtually carried with 
it the conclusion of the right of all baptized persons to vote 
for the minister, and was so far an acceptance of the "parish 
way " of Old England against the church way of New Eng- 
land. The findings of the ministers were reported by Mr. 
Stone to the General Court in August, 1657, and by the 
Court commended to the consideration of the churches. Mr. 
Warham and the Windsor church began the practice of half- 
way covenant baptism the 31st of January following, but 
gave it up in March, 1665. 

Nevertheless the churches generally were slow to accept 
the change. The agitation however continued, and the 
Synod of 1662 was called in view of it. Neither Connecticut 
nor New Haven Colonies were represented in this Massachu- 
setts Synod of 1662, but it ratified by a vote of more than 
seven to one the principles set forth in the answer given to 
the tenth of the Connecticut Questions by the Ministerial 
Assembly of 1657 '■> thus setting the endorsement of a Synod 
of the Churches to what is known as the Half- Way Cove- 
nant. 

Encouraged by this sanction and discouraged by the atti- 
tude of the Hartford Church and other churches in this 
Colony, an appeal to the General Court was made in October, 
1664, by Mr. William Pitkin (a very able, and, there is ample 
evidence, a sincere and godly man) and several others, which 
was in effect a claim that, having been baptized members of 



30 

the English National Church, they ought to be accounted on 
that basis and without further qualifications members of the 
local New England churches where they resided. The appeal 
met with sympathy. The Court responded with an intima- 
tion of readiness to order the churches so to practice " if 
they doe not practice without such order." It was in effect 
an explicit notice to the churches that the Government was 
in favor of the parish way, or, as it had begun to be called, 
the "Presbyterian way" of a State Church, rather than the 
way of Robinson and Hooker. 

It is at about this point that John Davenport lifts the 
curtain on the Thursday lecture-day scene I spoke of a few 
minutes ago. Up to this time, as Mr. Davenport declares, 
"the most of the churches in this jurisdiction" were strong 
on the old platform of a church consisting of " visible saints " 
only, and of baptism administered only to children of those 
in full communion. But the tide was against them, or against 
the principle on which they stood. For years the influence 
from over the water at home had been adverse. Presbyte- 
rianism had beaten Independency in England, and had suc- 
ceed to about all the " largeness " of Episcopacy, till itself 
had been superseded by a re-established Episcopal National 
Church. 

" Yong Mr. Heynes " and his party for Synodical authority, 
the " parish-way" and "large baptism " were obviously in the 
ascendency. Yet the minority could have no ecclesiastical 
relief. The law of March, 1658, forbidding all separate 
church assemblies (enacted to defeat Elder Goodwin's with- 
drawing party in the old quarrel with Mr. Stone) was still in 
force, and held Mr. Whiting and those who adhered to the 
anti-synodical, early-congregational way, in subjection to it. 
The Church and the colony were in a turmoil. The ever 
meddlesome General Court adopted several ineffectual expe- 
dients of redress, wearing out in the process two or three 
uneasy years. In May, 1669, however, apparently at last 
despairing of settling doctrinal questions by "orders" and 
"disputes," the Court passed a resolve giving permission to 



31 

all persons " approved according to law and sound in the 
fundamentalls of the Christian religion," to " have allowance 
of their perswasion and profession in church wayes." The 
immediate effect of this action, though the Court had no 
sympathy with their views, was to open a way of escape from 
their embarrassment to Mr. Whiting and his minority party 
in the Hartford Church. On the 22d of February, 1670, he 
and thirty-one members of this Church with their families 
withdrew, and formed themselves by the advice of council 
into the Second Church of Hartford. The platform of 
principles they adopted is a striking and vigorous statement 
of original Congregationalism, in opposition to the synodical 
or Presbyterianizing tendency of the time. It was a noble 
and timely utterance. But it significantly illustrates how in 
the process of a controversy the watchwords and the stress 
of battle often change, that the new church which went off 
from the old as the representative of old Congregationalism 
began, on the very day of its organization, to practice half- 
way covenant baptism. The original question at issue had 
been the relation to the church of those who, having been 
baptized in infancy or in England, desired a voice in church 
action and a part in church privileges. It came, in the six 
years of struggle, to be a question of, relatively, almost a 
theoretic interest, concerning synodical authority and self- 
government. The tide on the baptism question was too 
strong for any party to resist. Its original opponents 
abandoned even the attempt. Mr. Whiting continued the 
honored pastor of the Second Church till his death in 1689. 
The separation into two societies involved of course an altera- 
tion on the way of defraying ecclesiastical expenses, all hav- 
ing previously been done by town vote. 

Left in charge of this Church Mr. Haynes remained its 
sole minister. Apparently the experience of the Church had 
satisfied it with the trial of the dual pastorate. It did not 
repeat the experiment for a hundred and ninety-two years. 

Committed to the half-way covenant principle, inclined 
to favor " large Congregationalism " and synodical super- 
5 



32 

vision, the old Church swung with the 'general drift of 'the 
tide at that day. Mr. Haynes ministered to it till, at the 
still early age of thirty-eight years, he died May 24, 1679, 
having served the Church fifteen years; four in connection 
with Mr. Whiting, and eleven as sole Pastor. He was buried 
beside his father, the honored governor of the colony, and 
beside Hooker and Stone, the ministers of his boyhood and 
youth. 

Mr. Haynes was succeeded in the pastorate, some time 
late in 1679 or early in 1680, by Isaac Foster. In the 
historical sermon preached by Dr. Hawes on June 26, 1836, 
two hundred years after the arrival of the Newtown Church 
on its present soil, the preacher says of Isaac Foster: "The 
late Dr. Strong remarks of him, that 'he was eminent for 
piety and died young.' " Dr. Hawes adds : " This is the only 
record that remains of him, and places him among the just 
whose memory is blessed." 

Fortunately the developments of time enable us to ascer- 
tain a little more fully the facts of Mr. Foster's story; though, 
as his pastorate was short and uneventful, they must be shut 
up here into the narrowest compass. Has was born, proba- 
bly in 1652, son of Captain William Foster of Charlestown, 
Mass. He graduated at Harvard College in 167 1, and in the 
autumn following was captured by the Turks while on a 
voyage with his father to Bilboa. Ransomed from captivity 
in 1673, he held a fellowship for some years at Harvard Col- 
lege, where his eminent gifts attracted toward him the notice 
of several churches. Overtures were made to him in behalf 
of the churches of Charlestown and of Barnstable, Massachu- 
setts. These, for one reason or another failing, he was, in 
January, 1679, sounded respecting a call to the pastorate of 
our neighboring church of Windsor, A curious corre- 
spondence remains between Rev. John Whiting of the 
Second Church here, and Increase Mather of Boston, the 
object of which on Mr. Whiting's part was to find out how 
Mr. Foster stood on the questions which had so recently 
divided the Hartford Church. The correspondence cannot 



33 

be quoted here, but it plainly appears that the art of finding 
out how a man stands on the main theological issues of his 
time has not made much progress since 1679. Mr. Foster 
had all the wise caution of a modern candidate for a pulpit in 
a pretty evenly divided community, yet on the whole leaned 
to the "large congregational" side. The church at Windsor, 
however, called him after hearing him preach, and did it 
with enthusiasm. The matter there, nevertheless, fell 
through. It fell through, moreover, in curious coincidence 
with the vacancy in the First Hartford Church, caused just 
at that time by the death of Mr. Haynes. It seems probable 
that the leaning of the Windsor church toward the stricter 
Congregational party, and especially Mr. Foster's candidature 
in a manner under the surveillance of Mr. Whiting and others 
representing that party, may not have been altogether accepta- 
ble to the undoubtedly " pious " but obviously politic young 
minister; so that as a fact the call to the, just then, stricter 
Congregational church of Windsor was negatived, and a call 
to the more "Presbyterially" inclined Church of Hartford 
was accepted; and Mr. Whiting had him — instead of a neigh- 
bor six miles off — a townsman next door. Just when he 
was invited here, or when he came, cannot be told, all 
church records up to this period having vanished. But his 
ministry was short. He died August 21, 1682, in one of 
those epidemical sicknesses with which early Hartford seems 
to have been so often afflicted. 

Mr. Bradstreet of New London, records in his journal: 
"He was aged about thirty, a man of good Abilyties. His 
death has made such a breach yt it will not easily be made 
up." 

The young Pastor lies with his predecessors. The slab 
above him records at once his own burial place, and that of 
his successor ; a successor who not only took his office but 
married his widow, and so he vanished from among men. 

The successor who thus doubly came after Mr. Foster was 
Rev. Timothy Woodbridge. He was the son of Rev. 
John Woodbridge (himself son of a clergyman of the same 



34 

name), who was ordained pastor at Andover, Mass., October 
24, 1645 ; but returning to England became minister of 
Barford St. Martins in Wiltshire, where his son Timothy was 
baptized, January 13, 1656. Ejected from his parish, however, 
at the Episcopal restoration, he returned to America in 1663, 
and became an associate with his uncle, Thomas Parker, in 
the ministry at Newbury. Of young Timothy, who was seven 
years old on his father's return to America, nothing beyond 
his baptism is known till his graduation at Harvard College 
in 1675. Then follow eight years of considerable obscurity 
respecting him, till he appears at Hartford in 1683, supplying 
the pulpit "of the first church and congregation formerly 
under Mr. Isaac Foster's ministry." He was not, however, 
ordained in the ministry here till November 18, 1685. With 
Mr. Woodbridge the records of Church and Society first begin, 
all previous documents distinctly belonging to them having 
disappeared. 

The time at which Mr. Woodbridge entered on his ministry 
was a rather gloomy one. The demoralizing influence of the 
wars with the Indians where the Indians were hostile, and of 
intercourse with the Indians where they were friendly, was 
visible on every side. The operation of the half-way covenant 
was becoming manifest. The churches were becoming filled 
with people sufficiently religious to be church-members and 
impart church-membership to their children, but not religious 
enough to profess or to have any personal experiences of 
repentance or faith or to come to the Lord's Supper. Sins of 
drunkenness and licentiousness were astonishingly prevalent 
in a community only a few years previous marked by devoutest 
manners and sternest principles. It was in 1683, the first 
year of Mr. Woodbridge's preaching at Hartford, that Samuel 
Stone, the son of the honored former Teacher of this Church, 
and himself having been a "preacher some years with general 
acceptance," after a day spent " first at one and then at 
another taverne," fell into the Little river and was drowned. 
The general political disturbances which attended the death 
of the profligate King Charles; the accession of James II 



35 

the same year Mr. Woodbridge was installed Pastor; the 
arrival of Androsin Boston in 1686, and in Hartford in 1687; 
the excitement attending and following the hiding of the 
Charter; the English revolution and the accession of William 
and Mary, and declaration of war between England and 
France, were all unfavorable to the prevalence of order and 
piety in the town and in the colony. Meantime it is appar- 
ent from various sources that more than the usual severity of 
flood and storm and disease and scantiness of harvest, marked 
a protracted period of time, so that the twenty concluding 
years of the seventeenth century were among the darkest of 
New England history. 

In the midst of this prevalent depressed state of religion, 
it is in evidence that the ministers of this and other colonies 
made earnest efforts to stay the general tide. In response 
to the recommendations of the Reforming Synod of 1679, and 
to recommendations of the General Court, and to deep convic- 
tions of their own, they labored, if not with fully illuminated, 
certainly with sincere endeavor to reform morals and increase 
godliness. Something we need not hesitate to call revivals 
of religion, however imperfect the standard of estimate, from 
time to time appear. Such an experience came to this Hart- 
ford Church in the winter and spring of 1695-6. 

It was at an hour of general alarm on account of Indian 
disturbances a little way up the river. The crops of the 
previous season had been cut off. The community was under 
unusual religious impression. The result is seen on the Church 
records. Between February 23, 1696, and April 5th of the 
same year, one hundred and ninety-four persons, an equal 
number of either sex, gave assent to the convenant. It is, 
however, a significant commentary on the imperfection, 
perhaps of the reviving itself, and certainly of the religious 
system under which it took place, that on Sunday following 
the last above mentioned, when those admitted to "full 
communion" as the fruits of this winter's awakening were 
received, there were but twelve. 

Six deacons appear to have been elected to office in Mr. 



36 

Woodbridge's pastorate, three in 1691, and three in 1712. 
The election of the first three was apparently a matter of 
much deliberation. On March 11, 1686, the names of five 
persons were " proposed to ye church and left to their 
consideration." But action was not taken till April 23, 1691, 
when "Paul Peck, Senr., Joseph Easton, and Joseph Olm- 
stead were chosen Deacons." No record of formalities about 
the choice of John Sheldon, John Shepard, and Thomas 
Richards remains. 

As early as 1694 the people on the east side of the Con- 
necticut River petitioned the Court to have the " liberty of a 
minister " among themselves. The request, acceded to by 
the Court, was rather grudgingly allowed by the Old Church 
on condition that " all the land on the east that belongs to 
any of the people on the west side shall pay to the minis- 
try of the west side, and that all the land of the west side 
shall pay to the ministry of the west side, though it belongs 
to the people of the east side." Some controversy and 
trouble ensued. But time at last adjusted differences, and 
March 30, 1705, saw the ordination of Rev. Samuel Wood- 
bridge, a nephew of Timothy of the First Church, over the 
church of East Hartford. The date of the church organiza- 
tion, as a body ecclesiastically separate from the parent 
Church, it seems impossible exactly to determine. Less fric- 
tion appears to have attended the setting off of the West 
Hartford church and society, which events occurred with a 
good degree of amicableness in 17 13. 

Mr. Woodbridge was a man of large frame and strong 
constitution, but he appears to have been absent nearly two 
years from Hartford as an invalid in Boston between 1701 
and 1703. Several, and some of them rather pathetic 
endeavors " to condole with Mr. Woodbridg under the sor- 
rowful sircumstances," appear on the Society records. Mean- 
time the pulpit was supplied " att Thirty Shillings ye Sabath" 
by Ephraim Woodbridge, a nephew of the pastor, and by 
John Read and Nathaniel Hubbard, afterward distinguished 
lawyers in Massachusetts, who both appear to have tried 
preaching before settling down to law. 



■ 37 

There is ample evidence that Mr. Woodbridge occupied a 
prominent position as a minister in the colony. Concerning 
the two most considerable episodes of his life which illustrate 
this fact there cannot, however, on the present occasion be 
afforded space to go into any detail. Respecting the former 
of these passages of his history — his agency in the founding 
of Yale College and his controversy respecting its location, 
— only this can here be said : 

Mr. Woodbridge was one of the " ten principal ministers 
of the colony" nominated as "Trustees or Undertakers . . 
to found, erect, and govern a college." The old story of 
these men meeting in Branford in the year 1700, and laying 
a number of books upon the table, saying, " I give these 
books for the founding of a College Library in the Colony," 
is familiar to all. But Mr. Woodbridge, in sympathy with 
Mr. Buckingham of the Second Church, who became Trustee 
in 17 1 5, and in sympathy doubtless with most of the people 
in this northern part of the colony, wanted the permanent 
abode of the college, which had maintained hitherto a rather 
divided and peripatetic existence at Saybrook and Killing- 
worth, and Milford and Wethersfield, to be fixed at the last 
named, neighboring place. And perhaps the most dramatic 
incident of Mr. Woodbridge's whole history, may be found 
in that passage of it, when, having in various ways voted, 
remonstrated, and labored against the location of the college 
at New Haven, he presided at a rival commencement at 
Wethersfield, in defiance of the plain votes of the Trustees, 
and of the General Assembly, fixing the college at the former 
place. The occurrence is too pictorial not to claim expres- 
sion in President Clap's own statement of it. After describ- 
ing the " Splendid Commencement at New Haven," on Sep- 
tember 18, 1718; the dignity of the personages present, and 
the elegance of the "Latin Oration" with which "the Hon- 
orable Governor Saltoustall was pleased to Grace and Crown 
the whole Solemnity," he goes 'on to say that on the same 
day, " Something like a Commencement was carried on at 
Wethersfield before a large Number of Spectators ; five 



38 

Scholars who were originally of the Class which now took 
their Degrees at New Haven performed piiblick exercises ; 
the Rev. Mr. Woodbridge acted as Moderator, and he and 
Mr. Buckingham, and other Ministers present signed Certifi- 
cates that they judged them worthy of the Degree of Batch- 
elor of Arts ; these Mr. Woodbridge delivered to them in a 
formal Manner in the Meeting-House, which was commonly 
taken and represented as giving them their Degrees." The 
town of Hartford sympathized with its ministers in their 
rather excited and irregular proceedings, and elected Mr. 
Woodbridge and Mr. Buckingham the following year, repre- 
sentatives to the Assembly. Mr. Woodbridge prayed at the 
opening of the session on the 14th of May, but on the i8th 
his seat was challenged on account of his alleged charging 
the " Honorable the Governor and Council " in the college 
affair "with breach of the 6th and 8th commandments." 
The Lower House voted at first to exclude him from his 
seat, but subsequently acquitted him of blame. Just how 
the matter eventuated in the Upper House cannot be deter- 
mined. Mr. Woodbridge afterward became reconciled to 
the location of the college at New Haven, was Rector pro 
tempore at the Commencement in 1723, and a Trustee while 
he lived. 

Coincident in point of time with most of Mr. Woodbridge's 
earlier labors for the college, was his activity in originating 
and maintaining the Consociational System established by 
the adoption of the Saybrook platform in 1708. The move- 
ment for this system originated, naturally enough, with the 
trustees of the college, who were about the only ministers of 
the scattered churches of the colony to be brought by any 
public duties statedly together; but it was the result of pre- 
liminary discussion in the constituent county bodies, and of 
the consultation of their regularly elected delegates ; so that 
there seems no valid ground for the suggestion which has 
been made, that the body cfonvened at Saybrook in Septem- 
ber, 1708, was not a perfectly fair and fully representative 
body of the forty churches of Connecticut. 



39 

Among the Hartford county delegates to this Synod was 
Timothy Woodbridge, Pastor of the First Church, and John 
Haynes, one of its members, son of its former Pastor. 

For the purposes of the present discourse it is unnecessary 
to express any judgment as to the merits of the Saybrook 
Ecclesiastical Constitution. The system, bad or good, con- 
tinued the legally recognized one in the State till 1784, and 
remained the voluntarily accepted method of the majority of 
the churches much longer. In this Church, whose Pastor 
and delegate had some hand in its devisiijg, it continued 
operative one hundred and sixty-two years ; and its operation 
was such as to incline another eminent Pastor to say, at the 
one hundred and fiftieth anniversary meeting under the Say- 
brook Constitution, " the First Church of Hartford is a con- 
sociated church, and such I trust it will ever remain." 

The system thus set in working, Mr. Woodbridge energet- 
ically supported. Of the local county Association, organized 
under the system, he was generally moderator till his death. 
That event occurred, after a period of some months of disa- 
blement, on April 30, 1732, at the age of seventy-six years 
and six months; after his having served the Church in a min- 
isterial capacity forty-eight years and eight months ; having 
being for forty-six years and three months its ordained Pastor. 
Three hundred and sixteen persons were admitted to full 
communion, and four hundred and seventy-eight owned the 
covenant in Mr. Woodbridge's ministry. 

Mr. Woodbridge left two extant specimens of his pulpit 
powers, an Election Sermon preached May, 1724, and a Sing- 
ing Lectnre preached at East Hartford in June, 1727. 

His own funeral eulogium was spoken in an election ser- 
mon, eleven days after his death, by his neighbor and friend, 
the aged Timothy Edwards of East Windsor, son of Richard 
Edwards of this Church, and concludes with the declaration, 
which there is, perhaps, no considerable occasion to modify, 
" that he was one of the choicest and greatest men that has 
ever appeared among us in these parts of the country." 

Two days after the death of Woodbridge, and on the even- 
6 



40 

ing of his funeral, measures were taken by the Society of 
this Church " to treat with Mr. Daniel Wadsworih respecting 
his settling in the work of the ministry." Mr. Wadsworth 
had already sometime preached in the later weeks of Mr. 
Woodbridge's incapacity, and the result of overtures to him 
was that on the 28th of September, 1732, he was ordained 
as Pastor. The procedures on the occasion he has himself 
inscribed on the church record as follows : " The Rev. Mr. 
Whitman of Farmington, began with prayer, and preached 
a sermon from Matt, xxiv, 45. The Rev. Mr. Edwards of 
East Windsor made a prayer, and gave ye charge. The Rev. 
Mr. Marsh of Windsor made ye next prayer. The Rev. Mr. 
Colton of West Hartford gave the right hand of fellowship." 
The new pastor thus set in place in the twenty-eighth year 
of his age, was born at Farmington, November 14, 1704, and 
graduated at Yale College in 1726, in the same class with 
Elnathan Whitman (son of his old pastor at Farmington who 
preached at his ordination) who was soon to be his associate 
in the Hartford ministry as pastor of the Second Church. 

The occasion of the new ministry seems to have been laid 
hold of by the Society for the revival of the already much 
debated question of a new meeting-house. Into the long 
struggle over the location of this edifice and the story of its 
erection, it is unnecessary for me here to enter, the division 
of labor on this occasion assigning the whole matter to 
another hand. For the present it must suffice for me to say 
that the affair, wrangled over for years, was at last happily 
ended, and a new meeting-house, standing sidewise to the 
street, substantially on the spot where we now are, took the 
place of the old edifice in Meeting-House Yard, which had 
been used from near the planting of the settlement. 

The house was dedicated December 18, 1739; the sermon 
preached by the Pastor on the occasion from Haggai ii, 9, 
The glory of this latter house shall be greater than tJie former, 
saith the Lord of Hosts, being published, and affording us 
our only surviving specimen of Mr. Wadsworth's pulpit 
powers, which seem to have been of a respectable, though 
certainly not of a commanding order. 



41 

The institution of this pastorate brought also to an issue, 
in the slow, conservative way which had already become 
characteristic of the First Church, the very live question of 
that day, whether to sing " by ear " or " by rule." The ser- 
vice of song had been now for considerable period a matter 
of discord in many senses. Music for more than a genera- 
tion past (owing to the introduction of the Bay Psalm Book, 
having no musical notes, in the place of Ainsworth's or Stern- 
hold and Hopkins', which had the musical score) had become a 
matter of memory and varying tradition. Direct instruction 
was wanting ; instrumental accompaniments disallowed ; so 
that singing came to the pass of utter poverty and confusion. 
Tunes called by the same name were scarcely recognized in 
places a few miles apart. Some congregations did not 
attempt more than three or four. 

The effort to amend matters about the first quarter of 
the eighteenth century met with violent opposition. Many 
congregations almost split on the question. The innovation 
was denounced as an insult to the memory of the fathers, 
and as tending to Papacy. " If we once begin to sing by 
note, the next thing will be to pray by rule, and then comes 
Popery." The interposition of the General Court was in 
some instances necessary to quiet disturbances arising from 
the proposal to sing "by rule." 

In this Hartford Church the matter look a characteristic 
course. The old Pastor, Mr. Woodbridge, wanted the reforma- 
tion and preached a Singing Lecture, as has been men- 
tioned, by request of the Association at East Hartford in 
June, 1727, in its behalf. He also, as Moderator of the 
General Association, put his signature to a paper read to that 
body on May 12th of the same year, by Rev. N. Chauncey 
of Durham, and published by its order, entitled " Regular 
Singing Defended and Proved to be the Only True Way of 
Singing the Songs of the Lord." 

But the old Pastor died without the sight of the change he 
advocated. 

With the coming of Mr. Wadsworth, however, enthusiasm 



42 

enough was enkindled to induce the Society on the 20th of 
June, 1733, to take this cautious and tentative action: 
" Voted and agreed, that after the expiration of three months, 
singing by Rule shall be admitted to be practiced in the con- 
gregation of this Society, and until their Annual Meeting in 
December next ; & that then a Vote be Taken whether the 
Society will further proceed in that way or otherwise." The 
two leaders of the opposing methods were then designated 
" to take on them the care of setting the Psalm " for the 
periods specified ; " Mr. William Goodwin as usuall," and 
" Mr. Joseph Gilbert, jr., after the Expiration of the three 
months." Tried thus prudently for four months, the Society 
saw its way in December to vote " that singing by Rule be 
admitted and practiced in the congregation of this Society," 
and Mr. Gilbert was empowered " to sett the psalm." 

The favorable issue of the singing controversy, and 
especially of the meeting-house struggle, must have been 
very welcome to Mr. Wadsworth and the more spiritual por- 
tion of his people. These years of controversy were natu- 
rally years of barrenness. Meantime while Hartford Church 
was quarreling over its location only so far away as Windsor 
a remarkable revival had taken place under the ministry of 
Rev. Jonathan Marsh. The year 1735, just in the thick of 
the meeting-house conflict, was the year of the great revival 
under Jonathan Edwards at Northampton. It was, however, 
the year 1740, just after the entrance on the new house of 
worship, which is commonly taken as the commencement of 
that religious movement in New England known as the 
Great Awakening. It was this year that George White- 
field made his first preaching tour through New England. 
The religious condition of the community was eminently 
favorable for Mr. Whitefield's success. His youth, his elo- 
quence, his peculiar position as an Episcopal minister in full 
sympathy with the distinctive doctrines of the Puritans, 
attracted universal attention and good will. No such general 
prostration of a community before one man, and he only 
a young gospel preacher, was ever known before, and none 



43 

has been known since. He left Northampton Sunday even- 
ing, October 19th, accompanied by Jonathan Edwards as 
far as the house of Jonathan's father, Rev. Timothy, at 
East Windsor, preaching at Westfield and Springfield and 
Suflfield on the way. On the afternoon of October 21st 
he preached at East Windsor, and there Jonathan Edwards 
gently remonstrated with him about his denouncing the 
ministers; his practice of "judging other persons to be 
unconverted ; " and the large place he accorded to " visions " 
and other similar results of religious excitement. Next day, 
Monday, October 22d, he was here at Hartford, preaching in 
the new meeting-house, doubtless, to an audience which he 
describes in his customary exaggerated way, as " many 
thousands." Thence by Wethersfield, Middletown, and 
Wallingford, he went preaching to New Haven and so to 
New York. Some measure of benefit seems to have accom- 
panied or followed Mr. Whitefield's transit through Hartford. 
The records of this Church show an accession of twenty-five 
to its " full communion " membership, and of eleven to its 
"Covenant" in the twelve months succeeding. The records 
of the Second Church at this date are lost. The church in 
West Hartford gained forty-five, but whether all to its " com- 
munion " I am unable to say. 

These certainly do not seem large results for the great 
year of the Great Awakening. And large or small, they 
were attended and followed by some features which made all 
the ministers of Hartford, and most of the Hartford local 
Association, unite on February 5, 1745, over their individ- 
ual signatures, in a public printed " Testimony against Mr. 
Whitefield and his conduct," and a solemn " warning and 
caution " to their people not to hear him on his proposed 
second transit through New England. This declaration was 
followed by another of a like character, five months later, 
issued by the General Association over the hand of Benjamin 
Colton of West Hartford, Moderator, and Elnathan Whitman 
of the Second Church, Scribe. 

Why was this.-' And why was the very awakening which 



44 

in its general result so blessed Connecticut, and blesses it to 
this day, the occasion for a sharp conflict of feeling and 
judgment among the ministers and the churches ? The 
reason is not far to seek. Dr. Leonard Bacon acutely 
remarked, "the Whitefield of history is not exactly the 
Whitefield of popular tradition." It is so. The real White- 
field of the pilgrimage of 1740- was a young man of twenty- 
five, of burning eloquence and impassioned piety, but censo- 
rious, denunciative, and lending all the weight of his 
tremendous popular influence to the encouragement of 
fanatic extravagances of experience and expression in his 
converts and followers. Whosoever hesitated at any of his 
measures was pronounced unconverted and carnal. In spite 
of the wise and loving caution of Jonathan Edwards at East 
Windsor he preached, three days after, at New Haven — and 
of all congregations to a congregation of students — on the 
"dreadful ill consequences of an unconverted ministry." 

But all of Mr. Whitefield's own extravagances of speech 
might have been forgotten had it not been for the actions of 
his followers. Many of these, ordained ministers, either 
having no proper charge or forsaking it, went through the 
colony at their own will, encouraging discontent with the 
settled ministry, and promulgating crude and erroneous tests 
of piety and the means of attaining it. A numerous crop 
of lay exhorters rose in the churches, professing infallible 
ability to discern spirits, especially the spirits of ministers, 
and passing sudden and damnatory judgment on all who dif- 
fered from them. 

These excesses became so great as to attract in some 
instances the attention of the civil authorities. One con- 
spicuous case of this kind, which cannot be detailed at any 
length, is here adverted to only because of a certain dramatic 
connection with the church edifice of this Society. Rev. 
James Davenport of Southold, L. I., was one of the most 
accepted favorites and followers of Whitefield, who pronounced 
him " nearest to God " of any man he had known. He was 
a man of a wild sort of eloquence, and wherever he went 



45 

created great excitement. Arrested on a warrant from the 
General Court, together with Rev. Benjamin Pomroy, on a 
charge of inflaming the congregations he addressed, largely 
of children and youth, with doctrines subversive of all law 
and order, he was brought before the Assembly at Hartford 
on June i, 1742, about eighteen months after Mr. White- 
field's transit through the place. His trial took place in the 
meeting-house of this Society, and lasted two days. The 
town was in a state of excitement bordering on tumult. The 
partisans on either side rushed together to support or to over- 
bar the sheriff. Again and again it seemed as if the prisoners 
would be rescued from his custody. The night between the 
two days was little short of a riot. In the morning the mili- 
tia were ordered out to suppress disorder. The Assembly 
adjudged Mr. Davenport to be "disturbed in the rational 
faculties of his mind," and thus less responsible than he 
otherwise might be, and directed that he be sent out of the 
colony. And so, about four o'clock in the afternoon, Mr. 
Davenport was marched *' between two files of musketiers " 
from the meeting-house down to Connecticut river, and put 
aboard a boat for his home. 

All these things show the intensity of feeling connected 
with the Great Awakening period, and the reasons, to some 
extent, which made the Hartford ministers, and a large por- 
tion of the ministers of Connecticut generally, disfavor a 
second Whitefieldian pilgrimage. But for so doing they 
were stigmatized as Old Lights, Formalists, Arminians, incul- 
cators of " mere heathen morality," and careless of the souls 
of men. Some of Mr. Whitman's hearers deserted his con- 
gregation in favor of more spiritual instruction. There was 
really no just ground for such accusation. The charges were 
easy to make. They are in substance made in almost any 
revival period when any one dissents from the counsels of 
the most fervid promoters of any of its methods. They have 
in effect been made in very recent days. 

Possibly a larger share of benefit might have come to this 
community had this Church and its immediate neighbors 



46 

thrown themselves more into the line with Wheelock and 
Pomeroy, and Bellamy, and even somewhat more generously 
tolerated Davenport. Possibly also, not. Anyway this com- 
munity was spared the ecclesiastical scandals which separated 
churches and dishonored religion in some parts of the State 
where freer scope was given to the new measures of the new 
men. 

But right or wrong, Mr. Wadsworth's part in influencing 
religious affairs was soon afterward ended. He died Novem- 
ber 12, 1747, lacking two days of fort3'-three years of age; 
having filled a pastoral term of fifteen years and two months. 
He sleeps with his ministerial forerunners in the old grave 
yard. 

Ninety-nine persons were admitted to "full communion," 
and seventy-four to " covenant " during his ministry. 

Rev. Edward Dorr succeeded to the pastorate April 27, 
1748, after having preached a considerable period during Mr. 
Wadsworth's disability. Mr. Dorr was born at Lyme, Novem- 
ber 2, 1722. He united with the church in Lyme, June 7, 
1 74 1, under the ministry of Rev. Jonathan Parsons, one of 
the most useful and able of Connecticut's ministers in the 
era of the Great Awakening. He graduated at Yale Col- 
lege in the class of 1742, and was licensed to preach by the 
New Haven Association, May 29, 1744. Before coming to 
Hartford he preached more than two years at Kensington, 
in the midst of a church and society controversy, unnecessary 
here to relate. The elaborate and repeatedly modified mon- 
etary negotiations recorded on the books of our Society prior 
to his settlement, significantly indicate the unsettled condi- 
tion of financial affairs at the period, consequent largely on the 
colonial indebtedness in the repeated wars with the Indians 
and the French. Mr. Dorr followed the example of his pre- 
decessor by recording on the Church book the procedure at 
his ordination. "The Rev'd Mr. Bissell [of VVintonbury] 
began with prayer, ye Rev'd Mr. Whitman [of Second Church] 
preach'd a Sermon from 2 Cor. 4, 5. The Rev'd Mr. Col- 
ton [of West Hartford] made the first prayer. Mr. Whit- 



47 

man of Farmington gave the Charge. Mr. Steel [of Tol- 
land] made the second prayer, and Mr. Whitman of Hartford 
gave the right hand of Fellowship. Give me grace, O God, 
to be a faithful, and make me a successful minister of the 
Gospel of Christ. E. Dorr." 

The period of Mr. Dorr's ministry was one of great relig- 
ious declension, which lasted with slight and local interrup- 
tions throughout New England considerably beyond the 
period of his pastorate. 

The controversies of the preceding years, growing to some 
extent out of the Whitefieldian movement ; the separations 
which took place in many Connecticut churches ; the restive- 
ness of some under the Saybrook platform, and the resolu- 
tion of others in the administration of the discipline estab- 
lished by that platform ; the corrupting effects of the Indian 
and French wars, and the absence, however accounted for, of 
those divine influences which seem at times to triumph over 
all obstacles, — all combined to make this period of the coun- 
try's history one of general monotony and discouragement. 
In the midst of this comparatively depressed state of affairs, 
Mr. Dorr exercised a faithful and laborious ministry. One 
hundred and sixty-one persons "owned the covenant," and 
fifty-three were admitted to full communion, during the 
twenty-four and a half years of his pastorate. The compari- 
son of these numbers with the seventy-four who owned the 
covenant and the ninety-nine who were admitted to full com- 
munion in the fifteen years of Mr. Wadsworth's ministry, is 
significant. Especially significant is the striking alteration 
of proportion between those covenanting and those commun- 
ing. It is plain that a larger and larger number of people 
were contenting themselves with such a merely formal assent 
to the gospel as carried with it the privileges of a qualified 
church-membership, but implied no spiritual change. 

Amid this general state of public anxiety and of religious de- 
pression, a few items of local interest may be gathered up. In 
1755 it was thought necessary to enlarge the meeting-house, 
and a committee was appointed for the purpose, but the mat- 
7 



48 

ter seemed to go no further. The need could not have been 
great. All the inhabitants in Hartford at this time, includ- 
ing East and West Hartford, were less than thirty-five hund- 
red, and there were four meeting-houses. In 1756 the 
Society appointed a committee to inform Mr. Dorr that "this 
Society are desirous that Dr. Watts' Psalms may be sung in 
the congregation at the time of divine worship at least half 
ye time." A good deal of trouble all along these days seems 
to have attended the always vexatious business of " seating " 
the people. In the year 1760 the Society took a new course, 
and " voted and agreed that the inhabitants of this society 
for the future, and until this society shall order otherwise, 
have liberty to accommodate themselves with seats in the 
meeting-house at their discretion, any measures this society 
hath heretofore taken for seating sd house notwithstanding." 
This democratic plan did not long suit, however, for four 
years later the Society voted to " new seat the meeting-house 
in the common and usual way and manner." 

Mr. Dorr's period of ministry witnessed also the first 
endeavor to plant an Episcopal church in Hartford, by the 
preaching of Rev. Thomas Davies in 1762. The events 
connected with that endeavor have recently been narrated in 
Mr. C. J. Hoadly's lately published and admirable sketch of 
the history of Christ Church. They probably attracted the 
attention of Rev. Mr. Dorr somewhat more warmly because 
the " Sam. Talcott," who seemed to be the most troublesome 
Sanballat of the new movement, was a " covenant " member 
of the First Church, and Mr. Dorr's brother^n-law. Mr. 
Dorr's own attitude on the question of Episcopal separatism, 
as well as separatism of other kinds, is quite discernible to 
one who can at all read between the lines in his election 
sermon preached in 1765, in which he said : " I readily own 
that every establishment of a religious kind should be upon 
the most generous and catholic principles, and that no man 
or set of men should be excluded from it for mere specula- 
tive and immaterial points ; for different modes and cere- 
monies Suffer me to query with your Honors, zf/z^Z/j^r 



49 

the laws in this Colony made for the support of religion don^t 
need some very material ame7tdmejit ? And if they be suffi- 
cient, ivhcther the construction put upon them in many of our 
executive courts hath not a direct and natural tendency to 
undermine and sap the foundations of our ecclesiastical con- 
stitution ? 

But if Mr. Dorr was not in advance of his time on the 
question of toleration of dissenters, this same election ser- 
mon shows him in a most amiable and admirable attitude on 
the question of the treatment of the Indians, which he dis- 
cusses in another part of it. His views on this latter sub- 
ject, too extended to quote here, are as well worthy of con- 
sideration by our national government to-day, as they were 
by the colonial government of 1765. 

Mr. Dorr's lot was cast in a dull time of our ecclesiastical 
history ; he was cut off from life in the prime of his strength, 
and without posterity ; but the tokens that survive of him 
give him not only a fair but an honorable place in the ministry 
of this Church. He died, after many months of paralytic 
disability, Oct. 20, 1772, in the fiftieth year of his age. Rev. 
Samuel Whitman of the Second Church preached a funeral 
discourse, still extanr. He was buried beside his prede- 
cessors. 

After the death of Mr. Dorr the Society of this Church, in 
December of the same year, made unsuccessful overtures to 
" Mr. Joseph How " ; doubtless the Joseph Howe who was 
just finishing his tutorship at Yale College, who became 
pastor of the New South Church in Boston, and who died 
in T775. 

The next attempt was more successful, and resulted in the 
introduction to this Church's service of one of the most 
illustrious of its ministers. 

" Mr. Nathan Strong of Coventry," was invited by the 
Society to the ministry of this congregation, June 4, 1773, 
and was ordained to the pastorate on the 5th of January, 
1774; the sermon on the occasion being preached by Rev. 
Nathan Strong, his father, from 2 Tim. iv, 4: "But watch 



so 

thoiL in all things ; endure afflictions ; do the work of an 
evangelist; make full proof of thy ministry !' The sermon 
was published, and gives token that the religious influence 
which had been brought to bear on the boyhood and youth 
of the young minister, under his father's instruction, must 
have been of a robustly vigorous kind. The Pastor thus set 
in office in this Church was twenty-five years of age, having 
been born Oct. i6, 1748. He graduated at Yale College in 
the class of 1769, having among his associates Timothy 
Dwight, the future president of the college, and receiving at 
his graduation the first honor of the occasion. Mr. Strong 
was accustomed to refer the period of his personal spiritual 
renewal to his early life, but he seems not at first, after 
graduating, to have contemplated the ministry as a profession, 
but turned his attention to law. In 1772 and 1773 he was 
tutor in Yale College ; during which time he devoted himself 
to theology, and received overtures to the pastorate from 
several churches. President Stiles is said to have told the 
committee of the Hartford Church, when applied to respect- 
ing the tutor's fitness for the place, that " he was the most 
universal scholar he ever knew." 

The period of the institution of the new pastorate was a 
trying one. The colonial relationships to Great Britain were 
just on the point of rupture, and the feeble confederacies on 
this side of the Atlantic were about entering on a protracted 
and exhausting war with that then recognizedly chief 
belligerent power in the world. Divisions of sentiment 
respecting, not only the details of the struggle, but the main 
aim and method of it, divided to some extent every com- 
munity, and very distinctly that of Connecticut. 

At the same time the condition of the churches, spiritually 
considered, was very low. The half-way-covenant sowing 
was producing its natural harvest. There were only fifteen 
male members in full communion in this Church when Mr. 
Strong was set in pastoral charge. As the public conflict 
progressed, a tide of infidelity set in under the sympathetic 
influence of French associations in the war for Independence, 



51 

and religion became, to an extent unknown before or since 
in this land, a matter for gibe and contempt. 

In this condition of affairs Mr. Strong threw himself with 
great energy into the conflict for American liberty. He 
served some time as chaplain to the troops. He wrote and 
preached in support of the patriotic cause. Especially in 
the later political discussions connected with the establish- 
ment of the Federal constitution he published a series of 
about twenty articles intended to harmonize public opinion 
in the ratification of that instrument. It was not probably 
at all on account of his ardent advocacy of this cause, but it 
was certainly appropriately harmonious with it, that the con- 
vention which ratified the Constitution of the United States, 
on the part of Connecticut, was held in the meeting-house of 
this Society in 1788. 

Meantime the earlier period of Mr. Strong's ministry can- 
not be said to have been marked by tokens of spiritual vigor. 
Perhaps this was, in the nature of events, impossible. It 
may be, however, that Mr. Strong was lacking in some of 
those deeper convictions which distinguished and made so 
powerful his later ministry. It serves perhaps to corrobo- 
rate this impression, to know that in a considerable part of 
this portion of his life, Mr. Strong was engaged extensively 
in the distillery business, with his brother-in-law, Mr. Reuben 
Smith. The records of Hartford land-transfers show some 
twenty deeds of real estate involving thirty or forty thousand 
dollars worth of property, bought and sold by the partnership 
of "Reuben Smith & Co.," (Nathan Strong's name how- 
ever generally taking the priority in the deeds made to or 
by the partners) between 1790 and 1796, together with 
their vats, stills, and cooper shops, in the prosecution of this 
enterprise. The venture was ultimately unfortunate from a 
pecuniary point of view, and in October, 1798, writs of 
attachment were levied against the property, and, in default of 
that, against the bodies of Messrs. Strong and Smith, on a 
judgment against them. Mr. Smith prudently took himself 
to New York. Mr. Strong remained in the house he had 



52 

built (the house just south of the Athenaeum), which was 
attached under the sheriff's warrant. It is said that the 
sheriff proposed to take Mr. Strong to jail, but relented 
when told that he " would go with him if compelled, but if 
he went he would never enter the pulpit again." 

Whether the business distress which began to press upon 
Mr. Strong several years before this culminating incident of 
his disaster, had any causal connection with an altered tone 
in his ministry and a revived condition of things in his 
Church, it is perhaps presumptuous to assert. But certain 
it is that the year 1794, at which time the distillery business 
had broken down and the sale of effects appertaining to it 
had begun, witnessed the first indication of the spiritual 
awakening of his flock. One token of this quickened 
religious interest remains in a vote of the Society, Dec. 16, 
1794, "to light the meeting-house for evening lectures"; 
this being probably the first time religious meetings were 
ever held in any public building belonging to this Society in 
the evening. This earliest period of awakening was followed 
in 1798 and 1799 by a prolonged and powerful revival, which 
wrought a great change in the religious condition of the con- 
gregation. During its progress Mr. Strong published a 
volume of sermons of a character eminently fitted to awaken 
and promote a quickening of evangelic piety. This volume 
was followed by another in 1800, dealing with aspects of 
religious truth suited to confirm and strengthen those who 
had been brought under impression. These sermons, together 
with Mr. Strong's treatise on the Compatibility of Eternal 
Misery with Infinite Benevolence, in reply to a volume — found 
after his decease among his writings — of Rev. Dr. Huntington 
of Coventry, show great acuteness of thought, and an unusual 
vivacity and vigor of utterance. Unlike a great proportion 
of the sermons of that time, they are readable and might 
even be effectively preached to-day. They were perhaps the 
occasion of the conferring on him the degree of Doctor of 
Divinity by the College of New Jersey in 1801. 

No man more than Dr. Strono; contributed to the revival 



53 

of earnest piety which marked so extensively the close of 
the last century and the beginning of the present in this 
State. In 1808, and again shortly before his death, from 
1 8 13 to 1815, powerful awakenings in his congregation bore 
witness to the efficacy of the truth so cogently and persua- 
sively preached by him. Eighty-eight persons united with 
the Church in 1808,* the year after entering on the new 
meeting-house ; and one hundred and twenty-eight joined as 
the result of the revival of 181 3-14. it is greatly to be 
regretted that the perishing, or, more probably, the non- 
creation of any Church records (except a few memoranda by 
Mr. Barzillai Hudson, long a member of the Prudential Com- 
mittee) during the entire period of Dr. Strong's ministry, 
makes it impossible to trace precisely who they were, or in 
what numbers,, who united with the Church at any epoch of 
this pastorate previous to 1808. Especially to be regretted 
is it, that it is impossible accurately to discover the working 
of the revival spirit upon the half-way-covenant system in 
this Church which had practiced it so long. It is doubtful 
if that system was ever distinctly abrogated in Dr. Strong's 
day. The late Thomas S. Williams and wife both owned 
the covenant, it is believed in his time, and only made such 
a profession as brought them into the Church's full com- 
munion in 1834, in the days of his successor. 

In 1799 Dr. Strong published, in connection with Rev. 
Joseph Seward, a deacon of this Church, and Rev. Abel 
Flint, pastor of the Second Church, the volume known as the 
" Hartford Selection of Hymns," which attained a wide cir- 
culation among the churches, and which contained some 
metrical compositions of his own. These have been praised, 
but it can hardly have been for their poetry. 

Not the least of Dr. Strong's services to this Church and 
to the churches generally, was his labor in behalf of Mis- 
sions. It was largely his interest in the Connecticut Mis- 
sionary Society, formed in 1798 for the purpose of sending 
missionaries to the North and West, and of which society he 
was one of the original founders, that induced him to project 



54 

and in part to edit, and for a time largely to write, the 
Connecticut Evangelical Magazine. This monthly periodical 
was continued for fifteen years. The number of copies dur- 
ing the first five years averaged 3,730 annually. The net 
profits were paid over to the Connecticut Missionary Society, 
which received from this source ^11,620. 

The year 1807, December 3d, saw the entrance of this 
Society into this house of worship where we are now gathered, 
and which was generally regarded at that day, and as such 
described by Dr. Dwight in his Travels, as a masterpiece of 
ecclesiastical architecture. Stoves were first introduced into 
this edifice the year before Dr, Strong died, 18 15. The 
pulpit, the height of which it is said was first determined by 
Dr. Strong, was lowered two feet in 18 16, the year he died, 
and has (incredible as it may seem) been lowered three times 
since. 

In 1802, moved by the renewed sense of religious things 
in the community, the Society raised a fund of $4,709 by 
subscription, to be put on interest till it amounted to $7,000, 
then forever afterwards to be "kept entire" for the "sup- 
port of the ministry in the society." The names of the sub- 
scribers are entered in a roll of honor on the Society records. 
This fund met with the not unusual fate of such funds when 
the donors are dead and a society gets short of money, as we 
shall presently have occasion to see. 

This Bible, presented to the Church by Mr. Rueben Smith, 
Dr. Strong's partner in the unfortunate distillery business, 
and in memory of Deacon Solomon Smith, Dr. Strong's 
father-in-law, has been in use since 18 12. 

In 1 8 14, the Church entered on the use of its first confer- 
ence room, a brick edifice erected on a lot of ground, thirty 
by fifty feet in dimension, on Theater, now Temple street. 

Even this hasty sketch of Dr. Strong's ministry would be 
culpable did it not refer to his vast power of social influence 
and his unsurpassed vivacity and wit. The sharpness of his 
repartee often stood him in better stead than arguments. 
Many of his sallies and rejoinders are familiar to this day to 
people of this community. 



55 

Dr. Strong had his full share of trouble. Beside those of 
a financial kind, of which mention has been made, he was 
called on to bury two wives and a son (the survivor of his 
second wife Anna McCurdy), who, having just graduated at 
Yale College, was drowned at the East Hartford ferry. Dr. 
Strong lived a widower the last twenty-six years of his life. 

Negotiations for the settlement of a colleague were in har- 
monious progress between the Pastor and the Society when 
death intervened. Dr. Strong died December 25, 1816, in the 
sixty-ninth year of his age, and the forty-third of his min- 
istry. He was the first of this Church's Pastors to be buried 
elsewhere than in the old ground behind the church. His 
mortal part lies in the North Cemetery, His face and 
figure still survive in the living memory of a few among us, 
and his name must ever be honored in the annals of this 
place. 

The names of George Burgess, Heman Humphrey, and 
especially Eleazer T. Fitch, bring us to what seem modern 
times. All preached here during the months following Dr, 
Strong's decease, but to none was extended a formal call. 

Sunday, the 28th of September, 1817, saw in the pulpit of 
this Church, for the first time, a tall, awkward man of a little 
over twenty-seven years of age, who was destined to fill the 
second longest term of pastoral service in the two hundred and 
fifty years of its history hitherto. A member of this Church, 
now deceased, who well knew Dr. Strong, narrated to me his 
vivid impressions of that Sabbath and the sharp contrast he 
felt between the courtly and dignified bearing of the pastor 
of his youth, and the ungainly, impulsive, red-bandannad 
occupant of his place. But he truthfully added the reproof 
administered to him by a pious old aunt to whom he ventured 
to suggest some of his feelings : " Remember my words, that 
is to be a very remarkable man." 

Joel Hawes, one of this Church's and Connecticut's most 
eminently useful ministers, was born at Medway, Massachu- 
setts, December 22, 1789. His youth was passed amid asso- 
ciations not very congenial to scholarly tastes or even favora- 



56 

ble to mental improvement. It was at about eighteen years 
of age, and while engaged in serving a period in a cloth- 
dressing establishment that he experienced his first strong 
spiritual impressions, almost for the first time read the Bible, 
and became experimentally a Christian. He made confes- 
sion of his faith by uniting with the church in Medway, the 
first Sunday in May, 1808, being at that time also baptized. 
Studying a while in private, under the tuition of Rev. Dr. 
Crane of Northbridge, he entered Brown University in Sep- 
tember, 1809. He worked his way through college, teaching 
school in winter, but by indefatigable industry and labor 
graduated September i, 1813, second in rank in his class. 
He entered Andover Seminary in 1813 ; dropped out a year 
to teach in Phillips Academy, and graduated September, 

1 81 7. He had been licensed to preach by the Essex Middle 
Association on May 13th previous, and followed his licensure 
by preaching several Sabbaths for Rev. Dr. Dana of New- 
buryport. Measures looking to his call to the pastorate in 
connection with Dr. Dana were in progress when he was 
invited to preach at this First Church in Hartford. He 
came here on the Saturday following his graduation, and 
preached his first sermon here on the succeeding Sunday. 
After trial of his gifts for ten Sabbaths, a call was extended 
to him by the Church and Society, and on the 4th of March, 

18 1 8, he was ordained Pastor, being the tenth in the minis- 
terial succession of the pastoral line. In the public service 
of the ordination Prof. Fitch of Yale College offered the 
Introductory Prayer; Dr. Woods preached the Sermon, which 
was afterwards published, from Heb. xiii, 17; Dr. Nathan 
Perkins of West Hartford, offered the Ordaining Prayer ; 
Mr. Rowland of Windsor, gave the Charge; Dr. Abel Flint 
of the Second Church extended the Right Hand of P'ellow- 
ship, and Rev. Samuel Goodrich of Berlin, made the conclud- 
ing prayer. 

With the induction of Mr. Hawes into the pastorate, a 
period is reached where the thronging memories of some 
present, and of more and more in its later portions, will out- 



57 

run and outnumber any utterances of the speaker. All the 
more needful, therefore, will it be for him to confine himself 
to the main facts of the Church life, with small references as 
possible to personal biography. 

Dr. Strong had certainly been a very able and in most of 
his ministry a very devout and useful minister; but many 
things in Church and Society affairs were left by him at 
strangely loose ends. 

Dr. Hawes writes in the first year of the new pastorate : 
" Our Jerusalem is all in ruins. . . . No church records ; no 
accounts to tell me who are members and who not ; what 
children have been baptized and what not ; . . . many irreg- 
ular members, some timid ones, and I fear but few who would 
favor a thorough reformation." The new Pastor threw himself 
into his work with energy and success. Records began to be 
kept in the Church, unkept or most imperfectly kept for 
forty-five years. A Prudential Committee, the first in the 
church's history, was appointed in 1821, to "aid the Pastor 
in promoting the peace and welfare of the Church, and in the 
maintenance of gospel discipline," which last portion of their 
functions there is ample evidence they entered on with vigor. 

The same year the new pastorate was established, marks the 
beginning of Sunday-school work in Hartford. The " Sunday- 
School Society" was organized on the 5th of May, 1818, 
Rev. Abel Flint of the Second Church being President, and 
Mr. Hawes one of the directors. Four schools were formed 
with special reference to the four then existing religious 
societies in the place, — the First and Second Congregational, 
Christ Church, and the First Baptist, — but all under the 
patronage of the Union Society. This arrangement con- 
tinued, however, only about two years, when each society 
•took the management of the Sunday-school work into its own 
hands. 

With another action, to which the Church was persuaded 
about this time, we may or may not perhaps as fully sympa- 
thize. The new Pastor had just come from Andover, where 
the battle lines of the Unitarian controversy were set in 



58 

sharply hostile array. And he stigmatized the covenant of 
the Church here as " a covenant and confession of faith con- 
tained in just ten Arminian lines." That covenant, which, 
with slight verbal change, had been in use in this Church cer- 
tainly more than a century and a quarter, and perhaps from 
the beginning, reads as follows : 

" You do now solemnly, in the presence of God and of 
these witnesses, receive God in Christ to be your God, one 
God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost. You believe the Scriptures to be the word of God, 
and promise by divine grace to make them the rule of your 
life and conversation. You own yourself to be by nature a 
child of wrath, and declare that your only hope of mercy is 
through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, whom 
you now publicly profess to take for your Prophet, Priest, and 
King ; and you now give up yourself to Him to be ruled, 
governed, and eternally saved. You promise by divine grace 
regularly to attend all the ordinances of the Gospel (as God 
may give you light and opportunity), and to submit to the 
rule of the government of Christ in this church." 

Jusf where the " Arminianism " comes into this old for- 
mula, to which so many generations had given assent in the 
most solemn transaction of their lives, it is hard to tell. But 
the Church yielded to the Pastor's desire, and on the 29th of 
July, 1822, adopted a long, many-articled confession of faith, 
which, with slight and unimportant modifications, continues 
in use to this day. 

But revivals of religion occurred and marked the epoch of 
this ministry as none in the history of the Church had been 
marked before. One in 18 19 brought in six young men from 
the mechanic's workshop, four of whom shortly began to 
study for the ministry, one of whom. Rev. A. Gleason, still 
lives. 

One in 1820-21 pervaded the entire region, brought into 
the Hartford County Associated churches more than a thou- 
sand converts, and added to this Church one hundred and 
thirty-eight ; three of whom are members with us to-day. 



59 

Rev. Lyman Beecher of Litchfield assisted the Pastor in 
this revival and greatly contributed to its success. 

In 1826 was another time of refreshing in this region, and 
saw as its fruits fifty-four joined to this communion. 

In 1 83 1 was tried the experiment of a " protracted " or 
"four-days' " meeting, it is said for the first time in Connec- 
ticut, in union with the Second and North Churches. Fifty 
persons joined this Church as its consequence. 

In 1834 an important religious awakening occurred, which 
brought into this Church many heads of families and men of 
influence in the community hitherto unreached. The Pastor 
was aided at this period by the powerful preaching of Rev. 
Dr. Taylor of New Haven. Between sixty and seventy were, 
as a consequence, added to the fellowship. The year 1838 
brought in eighty. 

In 1 84 1 was another great revival in this region. Rev. 
Mr, Kirk, then in the prime of his popular eloquence and 
evangelistic fervor, preached in many of the Hartford 
churches with persuasive power. One hundred and ten per- 
sons were added to the Church at this period. More than 
one hundred stood up at one time in this aisle to confess 
their new faith. The revival of 1852 brought in sixty-six, 
and that of 1858 fifty. 

Ten periods of distinct religious awakening occurred during 
this ministry, and there were added to the Church in that 
space of time, by confession of faith, ten hundred and seventy- 
nine members. 

It is obvious to remark, in view of a fact like this, that the 
ministry of this eminent Pastor was cast in a period more 
characterized by general revival influences than any which 
had gone before for a hundred years, or that, from present 
signs, seems very likely soon to occur again. But it is 
equally obvious that these extraordinary results were largely 
attributable to the man himself who was in this pastorate at 
that period. His zeal, his wisdom, his perseverance, his pro- 
found convictions, his unmistakable sincerity and devotion, 
were powerful and, it is perfectly proper to say, indispensable 
elements in that wonderful series of awakenings. 



6o 

It was itself, indicative of one of the features of the 
Pastor's character which gave him such success in revival 
work, that Dr. Hawes preached, in 1827, that course of 
Lectures to Young Men which, on their delivery here and in 
New Haven, produced so profound an impression, and when 
published, both in this country and in England in repeated 
editions, wrought a still wider and more lasting benefit. 

The volume may seem trite now, but it was a venture into 
a comparatively fresh and untrodden field then, and aside 
from any higher ends attained by it, it made appropriate (cer- 
tainly as such things go) the Doctorate which Mr. Hawes 
received from the college of his youth. 

But if the period of this pastorate was one of large acces- 
sions to the church, it was also one of large colonizations 
from it. 

On the 23d of September, 1824, ninety-seven members 
received dismission from this Church, and were organized as 
the North Church. 

On the loth of January, 1832, eighteen members were 
organized with others as the Free, now the Fourth Church. 

On the 14th of October, 1852, thirty-six members of this 
Church, and soon after eleven more, were dismissed to unite 
with others in forming the Pearl Street Church. 

On the 5th of March, 1865, forty members and shortly 
after eleven more, were dismissed to unite with others in 
forming the Asylum Hill Church. 

The old Church was a quarry out of which everybody was 
free to draw the living stones of newer temples. It gave 
liberally. It gave men and it gave money. It was eminently 
a church-planting and missionary Church. 

The personal interest of its Pastor in the larger aspects 
of missionary work, which has been evidenced among other 
cogent ways in his giving his only daughter to live, and as 
it proved, to die on foreign missionary ground, was not with- 
out result in training the congregation to large-minded benefi- 
cence both at home and abroad. 

Meantime, all alongside this really grand record of churchly 



6i 

prosperity and usefulness ran the usualf. line of perplexing, 
amusing, and drudging incidents. Some people of the good 
old Society loved its privileges, but didn't like to pay for 
them. And so every year or two, from 1823 to 1848, votes 
appear on the records showing difficulties about meeting 
expenses, and expedients to make occupants of good pews, 
of an economical turn of mind, contribute a due proportion 
of the parish costs. An Act of the Legislature in the latter 
year, sought and secured as a means of grace to such, allow- 
ing the taxation of pews like any other property, seems to 
have been the effectual call, where other methods failed. 

In 1830 the Society raised the question of the possibility of 
appropriating something to help the Sunday-school ; debated 
it, doubted its legality, appointed a committee to investigate 
the novel and difficult question, had a divided report on the 
issue, thought it best to move slowly, and in 1842 (twelve 
years afterward), hazarded a first appropriation of a hundred 
and fifty dollars. 

The year 1831 brought up a question of a new conference- 
room, in place of the old one in Temple street ; and the year 
1832 brought the conference-room itself, the one now used. 
But it brought, also, in doing it, the appropriation and extin- 
guishment of the fund so solemnly described in 1802, " to be 
forever kept entire as a Society Fund, the interest thereof 
to be appropriated and applied for the support of the ministry 
in the society." 

The year 1822 saw the first organ put into this house, and 
the year 1835 saw the second — the one just displaced — an 
instrument so excellent that the Society's extended thanks to 
the maker of it are inscribed on its records. But, alas, 
nothing quite suits everybody, and 1837 saw on file the peti- 
tion of Ezekiel Williams, entreating relief from the terrible 
" sub-bass " of the dulcet new organ. A committee was 
raised to harmonize the sub-bass with the petitioner's nerves, 
with what success does not appear. 

The year 1835 lowered the pulpit a second time, and 
brought the galleries down nearly five feet ; and 185 1 swept 



62 

out the old square pews arour,d the walls, and the mahogany 
pulpit, lustrous yet, in the memory of some here, above all 
structures beside, 
jt. Early in 186/ Dr. Hawes wrote to the Society expressing 
his desire for a colleague in the ministerial work. The 
Society voted that it did not want a " colleague," but " a new 
minister. Dr. Hawes still retaining his pastoral relations to 
us." Dr. Hawes replied in an extended communication, 
urging the colleagueship, and declaring that the position of 
pastor emerittts proposed by the Society was " a change 
greater than [he] could at present desire." The Society 
yielded to his wish, and on the 21st of October, 1862, Mr. 
Wolcott Calkins was installed Associate Pastor. Mr. Calkins 
was born at Painted Post (now Corning), New York, June 10, 
1831; graduated at Yale College 1856; studied Theology at 
Union Seminary in 1859, ^.nd at the University of Halle in 
1 860-1 862. He was never "licensed" as a preacher, being 
ordained as well as installed at his entrance on the associate 
pastorate with Dr. Hawes. Mr. Calkins fulfilled the func- 
tions of his office about eighteen months, when, on April 
29, 1864, he resigned his associate pastorship. His resigna- 
tion was followed on the 5th of May by that of Dr. Hawes. 
An ecclesiastical council met on the 17th of May to con- 
sider the resignation of Mr. Calkins, but during its delibera- 
tions the case was withdrawn. Reassembled by call, however, 
on the 6th of July, Mr. Calkins was dismissed. Dr. Hawes 
being \tit pastor evieritiis of the Church. 

On the 14th of December, 1864, Rev. George H. Gould 
was installed pastor. Mr. Gould was born Feb. 20, 1827, at 
Oakham, Mass. Graduating at Amherst College in 1850, 
and Union Seminary in 1853, the early portion of his minis- 
try was spent in evangelistic work, chiefly in Wisconsin. 
He was ordained November 13, 1862, and served as acting 
pastor of the Olivet church, Springfield, Mass., from 1863 to 
1864, when he became Pastor of this Church. Dr. Gould 
continued in office till the nth day of October, 1870, when 
he was dismissed with the concurrence of a council. During 



63 

Dr. Gould's pastorate the old and venerated pastor emeritus 
died. This event took place at Gilead, where he had 
preached the Sunday previous, on May 5, 1867. All his 
children had died before him. His son, Erskine, pastor of 
the church in Plymouth, was killed by accident in July i860, 
His wife followed him, dying a week afterwards. 

Three discourses suggested by the life and death of Dr. 
Hawes were preached in Hartford. One at his funeral on 
June 8th, by President Woolsey ; one by Rev. E. P. Parker 
of the Second Church, and one by Dr. Gould, the Pastor of 
this Church. 

Few are the ministers of New England who have turned 
so many to righteousness as Joel Hawes. 

The pastorate of Rev. Dr. Gould was also marked by the 
reception by this Society, August 27, 1869, of the Fund 
devised by Mrs. Mary A. Warburton for support of the ser- 
vices at the Chapel which had been built by her previously 
(in 1865) on ground purchased by individual members of the 
Church. In May 1866, a charter for the School at this 
Chapel was granted to Mrs. Warburton and others. This 
mission was in 1869 formally adopted under the conditions 
of Mrs. Warburton's will by this Church. Under varying 
management and method this Warburton mission has been 
the scene of the most consecrated and laborious efforts 
put forth by the younger members of this fellowship in all 
the Church's later history. It shines in a dark place, and its 
beams have guided many heavenward. 

In the spring of 1871 this Church and Society extended 
a call to the pastorate made vacant by the dismission of Dr. 
Gould, to Rev. William H. Lord, D.D., of Montpelier, Ver- 
mont, an invitation which was, however, declined. 

More than a year elapsed in unsuccessful quest of a Pas- 
tor, when, on April 24, 1872, Rev. Elias H. Richardson," 
lately of Westfield, Mass., was installed in that office. Mr. 
Richardson was born at Lebanon, N. H., Aug. 11, 1827, 
graduated at Dartmouth College in 1850, and at Andover in 
1853. He was pastor, successively, at Goffstown and Ando- 
ver, N. H., Providence, R. I., and Westfield, Mass. 
9 



64 

He came to this pastorate in his forty-fifth year of age, 
and fulfilled in it a most laborious and faithful ministry of 
about six years and eight months. During this period 
occurred the series of meetings held in Hartford under the 
leadership of Mr. D. L. Moody and subsequently of Rev. 
George H. Pentecost, in the winter of 1877-8. 

In connection with these meetings and partly as their 
direct consequence a large numerical accession was made to 
the membership of the Hartford churches. About seventy- 
five names were added to the roll of this Church as such 
result. 

Dr. Richardson left the marks of his own earnest sincerity 
deeply engraved on many of the younger mernbers of this 
fellowship, who first of all think of him when they think of 
their guide to Christian living. He was a man of quick and 
keen intellectual perceptions, of warm and impulsive tem- 
perament, of delicate sensibilities, and devout piety. Some- 
thing in the intensity of his feelings contrasted with the 
more deliberate habitudes of the congregation, made the 
relationship less congenial to him than perhaps it might have 
been to a man of colder blood. But no truer-hearted servant 
of Christ ever stood in this pulpit than he. 

In December, 1878, Dr. Richardson resigned his pastorate 
here to accept that of the First church in New Britain, which 
had been tendered him. He was dismissed here on the 23d 
of that month, and installed there January 7, 1879. 

His pastorate at New Britain was eminently useful and 
happy. He was cut off" from it in the full prime of his vigor 
and success, dying honored and beloved on the 27th of June, 
1883, and being buried among the people of his latest pasto- 
ral charge. A funeral address on that occasion was pro- 
nounced by Rev. N. J. Burton, D.D., of this city, and on the 
following Sabbath a biographical discourse concerning Dr. 
Richardson's life and character was delivered in the Pearl 
Street Church by Rev. Dr. W. L. Gage. He was the first of 
the ministers of this Church to die elsewhere than in Hart- 
ford or to be buried elsewhere than in Hartford soil. 



65 

The present Pastor was installed February 27, 1879. 

No one can be more sensible than the speaker on this 
occasion how inadequate the words now spoken are to tell 
the story of this Church's two hundred and fifty years. The 
inevitable condensation of a narrative like this, long though 
it has been, presses out the flavor and perfume of what was, 
in Time's unfolding of it, a living and sometimes a lovely 
reality. The dried raisin of commerce is not much like the 
ripe grape of the vine. It touches one with a sense of 
pathos and almost of anger to think how much of sweetness 
and nobleness in private piety in all these years ; how much 
of faithfulness and self-sacrifice, of parental solicitude and 
of individual consecrated endeavor in the brotherhood of this 
Church has been passed over untold, nay, has perished 
utterly from human remembrance. The deeds, the experi- 
ences, the hopes, the cares, nay, even the names of this two- 
and-a-half century companionship are, and must forever 
remain, unknown. 

But unrecorded in the memories of men, they abide in 
the better registry of His mind and heart, who in all this 
duration has been this Church's guide and head. 

What remains to us of the story carries with it its own 
plain lessons, sometimes of encouragement, sometimes of 
warning ; now of reproof, and now of cheer. But the whole of 
it points us forward and not backward as the millennial time. 
This is not our rest. The New Jerusalem was never yet 
builded on any continent of earthly soil. Now, as ever, we 
wait the larger promises of the Kingdom of God. The clouds 
of witnesses who have gone before us seem to say, — and let 
us join them in the cry, — " Lord Jesus come quickly." 



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